The welfare state as a political source of social solidarity. An institutionalist perspective

The article examines the welfare state as a political source of solidarity and seeks to investigate the solidarisation potential of social policy. Can such abstract, state-organised relationships of mutual support, formalised through contributions and tax payments, generate solidarity in a society at all, and if so, what mechanisms are responsible for this? The analysis is based on the assumption that social solidarity in highly differentiated societies depends on political management and thus considers social policy as an essential precondition for the emergence of solidarity among strangers. In the tradition of classical sociology, solidarity is conceived as a dynamic and elastic concept (Sect. 2). Following on from this, the article examines the solidarisation potentials of modern welfare policy from an institutionalist theory perspective. Sect. 3 presents the central institutionalist assumptions and elaborates three mechanisms of action relevant to solidarity: the compass function (normative level), the stabilisation function (interpersonal level) and the hinge function (organisational level). From an institutional theory perspective, welfare state institutions in their dynamic interplay of guiding ideas, institutions and organisations structure the consciousness and behaviour of actors and shape their individual preferences and attitudes (e.g. with regard to redistribution preferences or ideas of justice) in the medium and long term. Accordingly, the welfare state represents an essential production and reproduction factor of values, action practices and horizontal and vertical social relations. Drawing on sociological and socio-historical welfare state research, the theory model is then exemplarily applied to the social history and functioning of the German welfare state, although not in a hypothesis-testing but empirically plausibilising sense. The analysis makes it possible to better classify and relate the ambivalent and crisis-ridden interpretations of the welfare state and contradictory contemporary diagnoses of society as a whole, such as polarisation vs. new solidarities.