Preliminary Programme

The elderly has during the last two hundred years been among the poorest in Sweden. Income level and living standard has sunken considerably after retirement and placed many elders under substantial level. With the first general insurance in Sweden, the Old Age pensions in 1913 and the improvement in 1936, 1947 and finally in 1960 did the poverty among elders diminishes considerably. The aim with this paper is to show the impact of general Old-Age pension reforms in reduction of poverty and in the construction of a welfare state. I will also show how Old-Age pensions have converted with mean income by using data other than the traditional taxation records when studying in income equality in Sweden between 1913 and 1960. (Show less)

The most intriguing feature of Swiss democracy is maybe not its precocity but the most reasonable – almost masochistic – way Swiss citizens used it. They not only enthusiastically accepted new taxes but they also regularly rejected the state's attempts to introduce welfare measures: to accept the state's money was considered unworthy of true democrats. This somewhat surprising attitude poses several questions that challenge the link between welfare state and democracy. Who were these "worthy" democrats? Why did they refuse the state's help? What were their reasons and their goals? How did this anti-welfare state trend evolve? Is it still perceptible today?
In order to answer these questions, I intend to follow two interconnected tracks. First, I shall look at the history of the votes concerning welfare state topics, which should show the dynamic of the acceptance or rejection of the welfare state. In parallel and correlatively, I intend to explore the conceptual side of these votes, deciphering not only the evolution of the meaning but most and foremost the connotation of the welfare state in Switzerland.
By combining both these approaches, one should understand why, at an early stage, Swiss democracy and welfare state couldn't be complementary concepts but were actually meant to be considered contradictory. (Show less)

The welfare state is undoubtedly a key concept in the history of the Nordic countries. It's formative importance in Nordic self understanding can hardly be exaggerated. It is usually used as a loosely defined analytical tool to describe Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and their ‘Sonderwege’ in the 20th century. Yet, the changing, overlapping and contested ways in which the welfare concepts (such as welfare policy, welfare society and welfare state) have been understood over time are unknown. “Welfare state” is a post-war concept with older domestic and transnational roots. As we will show, its present popularity is a recent phenomenon. This presentation will give a comparative take on the conceptual history of the welfare state and the peculiar relation between “state” and “society” in the Nordic countries, above all in Sweden and Finland. (Show less)

It is often stated that there is no standard definition of a "welfare
state". A survey of the standard textbooks support this claim. It is also often the case that academic works on welfare state and social policy history earmark lines or even pages to discussing the origins of the term welfare state. However, these brief accounts are often wrong in the details and are all of them missing important aspects. In this paper I offer the first detailed study of the origin of the term "welfare state" tracing it back to the mid-nineteenth century Germany and following its diverse and changing definitions in the German and British (and US) context until the 1940s. The study adds decades to the conventional understanding of this history and offers a much more nuanced understanding of the different definitions attributed to the term before its political breakthrough in the late 1940s. Projecting this post-war understanding backwards in time - what the literature generally does - is too simple and anachronistic. In the article, we argue for a more complex history of what might be labelled an "essentially confused concept".
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