Welfare reform by stealth? Cash benefit recipiency data and its additional value to the understanding of welfare state change in Europe

Trends in social protection schemes have been one of the main subjects in comparative welfare state research, not least since the financial crisis and the austerity measures that many European countries implemented in its aftermath. One of the key debates in literature is about how to measure the extent of public welfare provision as an indicator of welfare state change. Many quantitative researchers have used macro-level data on programmatic social expenditure or on the generosity of benefit rights, bringing forth major theories of welfare state retrenchment, system convergence, path dependency and paradigm changes in social policies. Recently, however, micro-level data on cash benefit receipt is seen as an alternative measure of welfare state change. Instead of gauging the cost reality of spending trends or the law reality of social rights reforms, this indicator is claimed to provide insight into changes of actual welfare receipt. This article studies benefit recipiency data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, covering 14 European countries for the period 2003 to 2013. It investigates cross-national welfare state dynamics by analysing national receipt-based benefit access rates and transfer shares and how they relate to dynamics in the prevailing indicators. Results show how much the choice of the indicator for the dependent variable affects the results of descriptive accounts of welfare state change. In addition, findings indicate what could be called welfare state reform by stealth. In several countries, levels of unemployment benefits stay significantly behind the development of median household incomes. This observation applies particularly to countries that are believed to have generous welfare systems, and it has not been revealed by research based on disaggregated social spending data or social rights data