Social State: Features, Impact, and Political Dynamics
1) Social State
The Social State, a political form emerging from the Liberal State, represents a necessary self-transformation. It involves transitioning from a non-voting state to an interventionist state, ensuring essential services like education, social security, and healthcare for citizens. This shift aims to eliminate public inhibition of economic and social activities and overcome the separation between state and civil society.
The market is replaced by a political formula designed to safeguard and stabilize socio-economic structures, promoting their growth. This results in the Social State, which was consolidated in the interwar period and is a modernized version of the Liberal State. It addresses the need for reordering, adjustment, and organization of capitalism through intervention in the market economy, facilitating the transition from a regulated individual market to the public organization of social security contributions. Public pressure led to the recognition of social demands, achieving low conflict and stagnant labor protest, thus legitimizing the system.
This review and correction of capitalism involves the State’s responsibility for welfare through intervention in the economy. The welfare state aims to reduce inequality.
This model of securing a subsistence level corrected inequality, eliminated extreme stress, disabled social protest, and cushioned the cyclical crises of capitalism while maintaining the level of demand.
The Social State is the result of a correlation of forces, a commitment between social classes. It has an interclass pact based on economic growth. The propertied classes accepted redistribution policies but required private ownership of the means of production, private initiative, and the market economy. In exchange, the lower classes saw an increase in consumption, social revolution was deferred, and their parties and unions were recognized. The active welfare state acts as an organizer of private enterprise and enforces market rules.
General Features
The Social State’s intervention in the economy goes beyond laissez-faire, seeking to regulate the market and reduce the absolute superiority of economic freedom.
The State directly becomes a productive subject, intervening in the market as an entrepreneur through public enterprise (Mixed Economy).
The assumption of social charges leads to the expansion of services, increased administration, and the size of the state, resulting in the expansion of public expenditure. Social rights are guiding principles without immediate binding content.
The mixed economic model also develops Keynesian state intervention techniques in the economy, such as the Welfare State, beyond laissez-faire, where the market should regulate itself without altering the maximization of private profit. Here, the active state acts as an anti-crisis cushion.
Politically, the Social State is based on a present social democracy where there is no direct participation of citizens, who can only participate by voting in elections. Political parties are considered exclusive channels of political participation and are mere electoral machines and institutional entities. They move from being an organization organized by the company to being part of the state, thus losing the ability to mediate social reality and vehicle social interests. Seeking to reach the maximum number of voters, they lose their ideological identity. Political parties are formed by political professionals, and the alternations of government set up limited routes, leading professional teams. In this way, democracy becomes a standard procedure for political leaders during the coming years.
In the Social State, there is a hegemony of executive power, which is more important and dominates over the other two powers. This hegemony can be seen and comes from the importance of delegated legislation and the indisputable role of parliament, blurring the separation of powers. This brings about the end of the myth of parliamentary sovereignty, and the imperative mandate is reintroduced through voting discipline. Parliament no longer has importance and stops being the center where decisions turn to host where they formalized negotiated decisions behind closed doors.