they acted as disincentives to work and, in monetarist terms, con-
tributed to increase the “natural”rate of unemployment. Third, they
grew increasingly costly, and appeared hard to maintain without
serious reforms. Fourth, they undermined core social values, and
encouraged “dependency,” marital breakdown, and teenage preg-
nancies among the poor.^44 Thatcher, for instance, insisted on giving
choices to individuals and on the importance of work and merit,
and she often pleaded in favor of the “Victorian virtues.”^45 Reagan
accepted in principle to help the “truly needy,” but believed that
most social programs actually reached citizens who did not need or
did not deserve public support – such as the Chicago “welfare Queen”
he liked to denounce in 1976 – and that social assistance injured
rather than helped the poor.^46
The welfare state, however, continued to be extremely popular.
Most citizens benefited, in one way or another, from social programs,
and they remained supportive of arrangements that were also anchored
in well-established institutions and guarded by organized and commit-
ted interest groups. Taking away benefits, noted Paul Pierson judi-
ciously turned out to be much more difficult than extending them.^47
Thatcher and Reagan, for instance, succeeded in cutting some of
the benefits aimed at the poor – always a weak constituency – but
only touched at the margin the larger social programs that constituted
middle-class entitlements.^48 More generally, across affluent democracies
(^44) Fred Block, “Rethinking the Political Economy of the Welfare State,” in Fred
Block, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven (eds.),
The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State, New York, Pantheon,
1987, p. 113; Barbara Ehrenreich, “The New Right Attack on Social Welfare,”
45 in Blocket al. (eds.),The Mean Season, p. 178.
Timothy Raison,Tories and the Welfare State: A History of Conservative
Social Policy since the Second World War, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990,
p. 107; Sylvia Bashevkin,Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work, and Social
46 Policy Reform, University of Toronto Press, 2002, p. 35.
Bashevkin,Welfare Hot Buttons, pp. 22–23; Gareth Davies, “The Welfare
State,” in W. Elliot Brownle and Hugh Davis Graham (eds.),The Reagan
Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies, Lawrence, University
47 Press of Kansas, 2003, p. 209.
Paul Pierson, “Coping with Permanent Austerity: Welfare State Restructuring
in Affluent Democracies,” in Paul Pierson (ed.),The New Politics of the
Welfare State, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 411–13.
(^48) Paul Pierson,Dismantling the Welfare State: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics
of Retrenchment, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 114–115; Carles Boix,
Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic
The triumph of market democracy (1980–2007) 149