Dept Sem:Pol of Social Welfare

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will study how different countries seek to protect the weak and vulnerable in society: the young, the aged, the unemployed, and the ill. We will examine both welfare state policies (pensions, health care, and education) and targeted programs at poverty alleviation, and seek to understand their successes and shortcomings. We will give particular attention to the political dynamics that allow for certain programs to emerge and work in some settings but be unthinkable or unsuccessful in other settings. We will study how social actors – including labor unions, employers, bureaucracies, and elected officials – can have competing interests in the design, finance, and reform of social policies, as well as examine how policies can “create politics” by investing these social groups with incentives to foment or block change. Regionally, we will focus first on Europe and the US, which were the earliest regions to develop welfare state policies, and then we will study the developing world, including Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Gulf States. These latter regions have presented remarkable innovation in social programs in recent decades.