ABSTRACT

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES: FINDINGS The cross-national comparisons and the German case study (Chapter 5) clarified not only the extent to which social democracy and Christian democracy were functional equivalents with respect to social spending, but also how this functional equivalence came about. The findings of the quantitative analyses, that the competition or interaction between social democracy and Christian democracy particularly encouraged spending and that Germany had a disproportionally high level of pension spending, could be understood better in the context of the political struggles over social policy reforms in Germany. The German case shows that Christian democracy was successful in its attempt to uphold the traditional system of social security and that the 1957 pension reform was, in fact, the conclusion of a long political struggle against forces opting for a more universal, Beveridge type of welfare state. This means that in terms of social spending the social democratic and Christian democratic welfare states were not dissimilar, although comparable levels of spending perhaps camouflaged real qualitative differences.