Actually, social spending can have either corporatist or social-democratic roots. The former is a result of upper class effort to appease and neutralize working class challenge (cf. Bismarck's Germany or Weimar), whereas the latter is an outcome of the working class success in controling the state and forcing it to implement social protection (cf. Sweden). The level of "corporatist" govt social spending is an indicator of how much bourgeoisie had to cave in to buy social peace, whereas the level of 'social-democratic' gov't social spendings is a more direct measure of progressive social policy. In both cases, however, gov't spendings offer a proxy measure of teh strength of the working class.
This can be easily demonstrated by comparing social spending in the US versus Western European OECD countries, shown below:
Government social spending as % of GDP, ca 1995 (excluding education)
US 16.3%
Austria 27.1% Belgium 28.8% Finland 32.1% France 30.1% Germany 29.6% Ireland 19.4% Netherlands 28.0% Spain 21.5% UK 22.8% Italy 24.7% Sweden 36.4%
EU mean 27.3%
source: OECD Social Expenditure Database
>Dennis' desire to believe that the grass is greener (forgive the pun) on
>the other side of the Atlantic is touching, but not true.
>
As the above data clearly show, EU countries spend on average 11% of their GDP more on social programs than does the US. The grass is thus MUCH MUCH greener on the other side of the pond. In fact, the US level of gov't social spending is of the same order of magnitude as that in many Third World countries. That confirms my long held suspicion that the US is a Third World country with nuclear weapons.
wojtek