Social Security/Social Protection

Summary

Social security is a response to the insecurities people experience under capitalism, ensuing from industrialization, marketization, and dislocation, or, more generally, to the contingencies of modern and modernizing societies. The term “social security” denotes a set of welfare programs that includes income security and social services, but social security is also a normative idea, associated with the notion of a good life. The idea of social security came up in the Great Depression in the United States and on global agendas during the 1940s as part of visions of a new post–World War II order. In 1948, social security became a UN-sponsored human right.

In the global North, social security has expanded massively after World War II, as the core of the welfare state. Western countries spend up to a third of their gross domestic product on the social, most of it on social security. Since the turn of the millennium, social protection (a term that has partially superseded the term social security) has massively spread also in the global South, and has become a major remit of international organizations, especially of the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and UNICEF. The rise of social security in the global South mainly refers to social cash transfers, mostly a kind of social assistance, while social insurance, the core of Northern social security, is weak in the global South due to widespread informal labor.

Social security has expanded not least because politics and business came to acknowledge the collective—economic, political, and social—utility of social security beyond individual welfare. In the global South, the utility of social security for development has increasingly been acknowledged but remains contested. With the growth of the welfare state, social security has become a major factor in shaping the everyday lives of the citizens, contributing to a good life but also subjecting the citizens to social control by legal regulations, bureaucracies, and the rule of experts. Capitalism has been transformed into “democratic welfare capitalism.” Since the 1980s, social security has partially been shifted to markets and families but often regulated by the state in view of social ends, giving rise to a “regulatory welfare state.”

Social security falls into distinct models (social insurance, social assistance, universal programs, ministration) that are based on distinct normative principles (achievement, need, equality, deserts for the common weal) and reflect distinct notions of social justice, none of which can claim superiority. The normative basis of social security even includes market principles that legitimize inequality. The design of concrete social security institutions is even more pluralistic and hybrid in normative terms. Accordingly, what is “social” and what is not “social” is not clearly defined and varies among social groups and over time. All in all, social security arguably is more about liberty than equality, designed to strengthen the resources and competencies of the citizens to enable them to make full use of their liberties.