Beyond the Anglo-European Welfare State: Understanding the Changing Political Dynamics of East Asia with Multiple Cleavages, Linkages, and Welfare Forms

Along with the inconsistent categorization of welfare regime type, low levels of social expenditure among East Asian countries has long been an unsolved puzzle considering their well-known achievements in terms of falling poverty, low unemployment and inequality, and rising education attainment. To address these shortcomings, this paper draws insights from the latest scholarly attempts to understand the welfare state development in light of multiple cleavages, multiple party-electorate linkages, and multiple forms of welfare policies. First, the paper tries to systematically clarify and expand three major concepts—primary/secondary cleavage, programmatic/particularisitc welfare benefits, orthodox welfare/functional equivalents—as groundwork. Then, it explains the structural logic behind the welfare expansion trend since 1990 in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan based on the whole universe of hand-coded bills—roughly 45,000. The major finding of the research is that the dispersed power structure—divided, coalition, minority governments—of three nations was a hitherto unnoticed significant political factor behind the transformation of fragmented, indirect, and weak welfare benefits into universal, direct, and generous ones. Specifically, the paper focuses on dimensions such as the number, the success ratio, the duration, and the co-sponsorship networks of different kinds of welfare bills in understanding the latest welfare politics in three countries by applying event history analysis, social network analysis, and logistic regression. The analysis so far suggests that when bargaining among a number of parties prevailed, politics tended to be based on social welfare issues—which is positive-sum secondary/tertiary cleavage in all three countries—and welfare policies were likely to be orthodox ones for the median voters/marginalised people such as consumers, women, the disabled, or the elderly. In contrast, the concentrated power structure often witnessed quid-pro-quo distributive politics based on particularistic and functional equivalent welfare benefits like construction projects, agricultural subsidies, and labour regulations for insiders without transparent democratic deliberation process.