In this themed section, the editors and authors take us far beyond the usual thinking about welfare reform. How, they ask, do politicians want us to feel about welfare reform? How do we think we should feel and how do we feel about it? How does the disabled woman who has lost her government-provided caregiver and ‘hasn't been out of the house since Christmas’, feel about it? Or the man who petitions to restore his lost government aid – but fails to do so? Or the wealthy Dutch tax payer? These are are the sorts of questions that arise in the study of a changing welfare states.Footnote ¹

In recent years, all the nations of Europe, the United States of America, Canada and the former Soviet bloc have responded to the challenges of growing global competition, the growing power of large companies, creeping debt and an aging work force by altering the terms under which they give aid to citizens in need.Footnote ² In the US, the pressure to reduce aid to citizens has been exacerbated by a prolonged push to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy. In l997, President Clinton introduced a bracing new policy, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and ended the more generous policies that had existed since the l930s. He set a five-year lifetime limit on federal benefits, and required recipients to work for their benefits, after two years, at least thirty hours a week – a policy dubbed by some critics as ‘governmental child abuse’.Footnote ³ Denmark introduced ‘flexicurity’, 80 per cent salary replacement during two years of job retraining. In 2009, the Netherlands instituted ‘activation reform’ – cuts in aid together with placement in volunteer jobs.Footnote ⁴ Although the common trend is to activate citizens in the welfare state, nations differ in their practice of welfare reform.

Policy makers of different nations also differ in their cultural stance toward welfare reform. With a dual focus on practice and ideology, the editors open to view a rich array of contradictions – or ‘pinches’ – between practice and ideology. Fostering an ideology of extreme, ‘you're on your own’, individualism, officials in neoliberal states both offer very little welfare (practice) and propagate a culture dishonoring recipients (ideology). In both practice and ideology, such states discourage welfare, and so produce little pinch between what they say and do. Or leaders can encourage citizens to believe in the caring state, raise their expectations of it, meet those high expectations, and once again produce no pinch. States could also disparage the caring state, but nonetheless grudgingly offer benefits – at least in theory. Or politicians and citizens alike can face the biggest pinch of all, as in much of Europe, where the act of reducing benefits flies in the face of a long and proud tradition of generous state support.

Faced with just this pinch, European officials have tried to engineer different ideas about the right way to feel about welfare cuts – the topic of the article by Verhoeven and Tonkens. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, speaks of an empowered army of citizens, of the ‘Big Society’, suggesting the image of the exhilarated citizen proudly volunteering to help his fellow man. Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands appealed, on the other hand, to a weary sense of parent-like responsibility to take on more care of family and community, even as the government took on less.

However officials engineer feeling rules for the citizenry, they also secretly imagine how welfare recipients will react to cuts: With stoic resignation? With righteous rage? With an aggrieved sense of betrayal? In a secret taping of a recent speech by Mitt Romney to a private meeting of fund-raisers, for example, the Republican candidate for President of the US caused a national uproar by contemptuously stating that 47 per cent of American people paid no taxes, saw themselves as ‘victims’ and took ‘no responsibility for their lives’ (according to a 2008 Cornell University Study, 96 per cent of Americans benefit from any of twenty-one US federal government policies – from student loans to Medicare).Footnote ⁵

Recipients of welfare have their own feeling about needing and receiving government help. Many welfare recipients sense that richer people look down on them, however unjustly. So they manage their shame at being dependent, Kampen, Elshout and Tonkens observe, by elaborating alternate sources of pride, as if to say ‘I'm happy at what I do . . . I'm good at what I do . . . I care more than others’. In addition, many welfare recipients lose benefits. As Grootegoed, Bröer and Duyvendak note, a quarter of recipients have lost all their welfare allotment, and more suffered severe cuts in theirs. Fewer than 10 per cent have challenged the cuts; they feel too ashamed to protest against the cuts, the authors suggest, and are afraid of being turned away once more.

Even when government help is available, welfare recipients discover cultural strings attached. They have to act a certain way to be the ‘proper’ recipient – i.e. good middle class consumers of services: grateful, reliable, knowledgeable choice-makers, and not depressed, bewildered or fearful, as Baxter and Glendinning, on support-related choice-making, and Tonkens and Verplanke, on ‘behind the front door’ policies, illustrate. And those who provide hands-on care to welfare recipients as migrant care workers, such as the Bulgarian and Slovakian care-givers described by Bauer and Österle, often suffer invisible strains in caring for their own older parents and young children who live far away.

In opening up the new field of emotional welfare reform, the authors cast new light on the invisible and under-theorised world of care. Faced with an urgent need, how do we think and feel about the ‘right’ person or institution to turn to? Parents, children, siblings? Friends? Private service providers? Government-sponsored services? What shame, fear and anxiety do we feel when we have turned ‘too much’ to one source of help or ‘not enough’ to another? How do the answers to these questions vary across national borders? At its foundation, welfare reform is emotional reform which is tied, in turn, to the larger web of give and take in human life. Each ‘give’ has its framing rule, its feeling rule, its experience of feeling – and so does each ‘take’. Each culture of give and take also has a politics. Neo-liberalism promotes its rules of give and take, and social democracies encourage theirs. And it takes an approach such as that used here to illuminate the great differences politics can make to everyday life.