Project "Intermediary Structures and the Welfare State"
Research on the welfare state has rather neglected the role of intermediary structures in the production of social welfare. In particular the churches have been playing a major role in the provision of social welfare long before the modern welfare statewas founded. Still, there are huge variations in the welfare production of the churches to be be found across Western Europe.These will be analysed and explained from a comparative perspective.
The main empirical aim of the project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is to study the profile of social service production of the churches in Western Europe in a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Research questions in this context are: 1. For which target groups do denominational welfare organisations provide social services? 2. How many institutions, places, beds and how much time for counselling do they offer? 3. Which forms of service provision do they prefer? 4. From which financial resources in relatives shares are their services funded? 5. How many members of religious congregations do they employ and do they rely more on volunteers or on professionals? These data will be collected by a survey based on a questionnaire that shall be sent to all denominational welfare organisations in eleven Western European countries.
The sample of countries was chosen according to the huge variations in the historically grown state-church-configurations in Western Europe that mark the space of action for church welfare organisations: 1. The state-church-relations in the Lutheran countries are characterized by a unity between state and church as expressed in the concept of a national church. This is the case in Norway and Sweden, but also in Great Britain which adopted a similar model of building a national church as did the Scandinavian countries. 2. In Catholic countries with a weak liberalism, the state-church-conflict was weak since the state did early succeed in incorporating the church. Relevant cases are Spain and Austria. 3. A strong conflict between state and church occurred in all countries with strong liberalism opposing Catholicism and/or Calvinism: Countries in case are the culturally fragmented nations along the European city belt such as Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. For practical reasons, we concentrate in the first phase of the project on the small democracies of Western Europe,namely Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway as well as Germany. All these countries have developed a rich landscape of organized welfare.
The theoretical aim of the project is to contribute to the research question whether the churches as one part of the intermediary sector could profit from the crisis of the welfare state in the aftermath of the economic recession of the 1970ies by filling the gap in social service provision.
Directors: Prof. Dr. Peter Flora, Dr. Elisabeth Fix
Researcher: Dr. Birgit Fix
The project has been funded by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from may 2001 for the duration of a
two-years period.