Marlon Barbehon - Middle Class and Welfare State: Making Sense of an Ambivalent Relationship

This book examines the relationship between the middle class and the welfare state.

Taking an interpretive approach which understands the middle class as a socially constructed category, it combines discourse analysis, welfare state theory, and interpretive policy analysis in an innovative way to investigate how the middle class becomes a meaningful object of public debates and policymaking. Comparing Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the book reconstructs the prevalent images and meanings of the middle class from each countrys public debates and tracks how the middle classes with their various meanings and characteristics are entangled with the identification of societal problems, the articulation of political demands, and the construction of welfare policies. Ultimately, it shows how the formation and consolidation of different welfare regimes can be interpreted as specific ways of solving the puzzle of how to incorporate the middle class in the construction of a welfare state consensus.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative welfare state research, policy analysis, political sociology, political theory, and European and comparative politics.

Marlon Barbehn is Research Assistant (Postdoc) at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Marilena Geugjes is Research Assistant at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Michael Haus is Professor of Modern Political Theory at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany.

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Middle Class and Welfare State

Making Sense of an Ambivalent Relationship

Marlon Barbehn, Marilena Geugjes, and Michael Haus

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Marlon Barbehn, Marilena Geugjes, and Michael Haus

First published 2020

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2020 Marlon Barbehn, Marilena Geugjes, and Michael Haus

The right of Marlon Barbehn, Marilena Geugjes, and Michael Haus to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-32237-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-31976-1 (ebk)

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This book presents the main results of the research project How Central is the Middle? Middle Class Discourse and Welfare State Change in International Comparison, conducted at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University. The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (HA 4438/4-1) and was carried out by Michael Haus (head researcher), Marlon Barbehn, and Marilena Geugjes. We are greatly indebted to our student researchers, Shila Block, Johannes Buzin, Anja Folberth, Sara Kettenring, Hannah Klein, Muhammad Ali Nasir and Hannah Niemeyer for their crucial support during the project and the writing of this book. We also would like to thank Dannica Fleu for her investigation of the relevance and meaning of the notion of the middle in the history of political ideas. Our thanks also go to Christina Scheffler who took care of the organisational aspects of the project and thus allowed us to focus on the conceptual work. Finally, we wish to thank Samantha Hawkins for her careful proofreading of earlier versions of the book manuscript. The idea for investigating the relationship between the middle class and the welfare state emerged from collaborations with Wolfram Lamping, with whom we would have loved to discuss the results of our research, and who we will always remember with our deepest gratitude.

This book explores the relationship between the middle class and the British, German, and Swedish welfare state. As this is a truly complex topic, our journey starts with a common technique of complexity reduction: a Google search. On 20 November 2018 (a date chosen at random), we performed three analogous search operations in Google News1 using the terms United Kingdom middle class, Deutschland Mittelschicht, and Sverige medelklass. The search operations resulted in three distinct lists of current news reports that in some way relate to the middle class within each respective country. When taking a closer and comparative look at these three search results, two aspects stand out: the lists present remarkably different types of news, and each list shows a certain pattern.

For the UK, the first results cover newspaper articles on different political, economic, and cultural topics. The BBC for instance reports on a recent survey among male and female members of the House of Commons which revealed that white, middle-class men are still seen as the ideal political candidates.2 Another article in The Guardian comments on the current political agenda of hard-right revolutionaries within the Conservative Party and quotes from a position paper of a Tory MP who argued that the British welfare state has to ensure that middle-class Peter should not be robbed to pay working-class Paul.3 Finally, in a Telegraph article a journalist reports on a new hotel in Norfolk and describes the interior design as tastefully timber-clad and tiled, more middle-class barn conversion than Breaking Bad filming location.4 Although representing quite different topics, a striking commonality of these articles is their somewhat similar use of the middle-class category: it serves as an adjective for classifying and categorising a specific and advantaged realm of society which is presented as different from other societal realities such as the working class.