Comparative Political Analysis, Ist Edition

CHAPTER 15

The Neo Liberal State

Chetna Sharma

Reader’s Guide

The welfare states covered in the previous chapter, which experienced nearly three decades of expansion after 1945, have faced difficulties in the decades following the 1970s. Starting in the late 1970s, welfare states were consistently attacked in a series of nations under the pretence of fostering dependency culture and inefficiency. The changes that were originally felt as an economic crisis and later as a change in the dominant forms of production and social organisation must be adapted by states all over the world. Politicians and decision-makers found it difficult to modify welfare state programmes to satisfy post-industrial society’s needs. Neoliberal critiques and post-industrial ...