How central is the middle? Middle class discourses and welfare state change in international comparison

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Haus
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278130433

When it comes to assessing social change, phenomena of crises or the necessity of political reforms, the middle class serves as a continuous point of reference. In these contexts of communication, the welfare state often plays an ambivalent role as it is portrayed both as a threat for and as a supporter of the middle class. However, the socio-structural boundaries, the interests and the normative meaning of "the middle" are not naturally or objectively given but find their way into political discourses and decisions through specific ways of perception and interpretation. Due to its discursive omnipresence we can expect the category of the middle class to be a particularly powerful facet for negotiating ideas of social order and political programs. Yet at the same time, we know little about the argumentative practices through which the middle class becomes a meaningful discursive entity and how these discourses structure welfare reforms. By investigating this interrelation interpretively we may gain a better understanding of the functioning of discourses and the transformation of welfare policies. This applies all the more so in view of a new politics of the welfare state which seems to question well established path dependencies and causal mechanisms (Pierson 2001).To answer the question how "the middle" is discursively constructed and in which ways these constructions are relevant for welfare state changes, the research project compares the German, British and Swedish case from an interpretive, discourse-analytical perspective. In contrast to the mainstream of welfare state research, the project does not aim at developing and testing a variable-based approach grounded on generalized impact factors. Rather, it will reconstruct the social practices which constitute specific stocks of knowledge about the societal middle and its significance for welfare policies. To do this, the project will, firstly, investigate media (and other public) discourses by asking how the societal middle is constructed (mainly) in newspaper articles. Secondly, it is examined how design and argumentative justification of welfare reforms and reform initiatives are geared towards the collective imagination of the needs and desires of the middle class. Both aspects are to be investigated by a systematic comparison of Germany, Great Britain and Sweden to identify both the overarching structures and the national specifics and to relate these discourse-analytical results back to comparative welfare state research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants