ABSTRACT
The relationship between war and the welfare state is contested. While some scholars consider war as a pacemaker of the welfare state (Titmuss, 1950; Wilensky, 1975; Preller, 1978; Kaufman, 1983; Dryzek and Goodin, 1986; Dwork, 1987; Marwick, 1988; Porter, 1994; Kasza, 1996, 2002; Klausen, 1998; Skocpol, 1992; Reidegeld, 1989; Castles, 2010), others emphasize a sharp trade-off between guns and butter and highlight the negative impacts of military conflict on social protection (see Gal, 2007, for a recent overview). However, many of these findings are based on case-study evidence or only focus on social spending. A systematic comparative analysis of the impacts of war on the patterns and pathways of welfare state development as well as the underlying causal mechanisms is still lacking.1 A possible reason why comparative welfare state research has not systematically paid attention to war as an explanatory variable of welfare state dynamics is the exceptional nature of the phenomenon itself. War is a rare and anomalous contingency that is conceptualized in the human and social sciences as exogenous shock, ‘abnormal event’ (Kasza, 1996), ‘black swan’ emergency (Castles, 2010) or a critical juncture (cf. Capoccia and Kelemen, 2007). All these conceptualizations suggest that conventional theories of comparative public policy rarely apply under circumstances of war and are therefore only to a limited extent suitable for generating meaningful hypotheses on the nexus between war and the welfare state. Even in democracies, special executive emergency powers, censorship, the suspension of democratic rights, public control of the economy and the coalescence of government and opposition are prevalent in wartime, while institutional veto points become less important. Furthermore, wartime decision-making takes place under conditions of high uncertainty and * This chapter is a considerably revised and extended version of a review article that will be
under circumstances in which the military becomes a relevant, if not the dominant actor. In a nutshell, wartime politics follows radically different rules and takes place under markedly different circumstances from those of normal peacetime politics.
