De Facto: [Nos] Current Research
Revisiting Social Policy through Class Boundaries
(Collective Cases of Europe and Asia; and Comparative Cases of Spain, Russia, Japan, and China)
escrito por Dini Harmita
Abstract
As part of deliberative democracy policies tend to be classified as political, public, and social policy. They tend to be seen separately when they're actually related. I took my master study in Japan with a major in Poverty and Social Policy yet I remember zero about social policy theories. The probability of my concern to poverty is higher than the social policy itself becomes magnanimous. At the same time I have been working with Japan for Indonesian development and learning about Spain, Russia, and China’s politics, especially freedom and democracy. I want to combine both theories and practices to understand more about social policy. Since class boundaries are one of the roots of polarisation everywhere including in those four developed countries, I want to revisit the social policy through the class boundaries. The methodology of this research paper is purely literature review by also combining my experiences with both theories and practices. With … the major finding is …
Key words: Social Policy, Class Boundaries, Europe, Spain, Russia, Japan, China, Freedom, Democracy
Background
Developed countries tend to have problems with ageing populations yet Russia is killing every of theirs mainly through wars. Ramos and Cavalho (2021) discussed social policy in Portugal from the class boundaries’ point of view. Nonetheless, interestingly it doesn't happen only in Portugal. The polarisation we have been discussing everywhere is caused by or called as the class boundaries as part of social policy’s foundation by scholars including Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton (2020) who discussed Croatia, Hungary, and Poland.
Social policy tends to be seen as social charity when empowerment is actually and in fact also the main part of sustainable social policy. That happened also in Spain when social housing is called social policy even in 2024 (Hernandéz Falagán and Roselló Nicolau, 2024) while ordinary or regular housing is called as part of enterprise. The class boundaries has emerged the term ‘working class’ in Europe, like also used by Korpi (2022) who discussed the Swedish case.
The class boundaries itself was born as a critique towards Marxism and Weberian using Bourdieu’s. Three of them agreed on the phenomenon and hypothesis where those who accumulate the capitals can conquer the world; nonetheless they don't approve the idea. Many of their students have developed political, public, and social policies to decline the courses and discourses mainly practically yet the polarisation is still there including in Europe.
In Asia, Japan and China are among countries who can maintain economic capitals in stable ways through several indicators such as GDP and employment nonetheless not from other indicators such as social and cultural capitals. Symbolically, India has eliminated the untouchables but the poor are still there because given that the untouchable was below the lowest caste there, the lowest caste itself is still categorised as poor universally and locally. In the eyes of democracy, those indicators represent financial freedom.
Research Question, Hypothesis, and Methodology
To understand more about social policy in freedom and democracy through the eyes of class boundaries I formulated the research question as follows.
“What kind of freedoms are offered by social policies in authoritarian, populist, and democratic countries?”
With mainly literature review the hypothesis of the research question is written below.
“Authoritarian-populist countries tend to accumulate capitals through economic capitals in the forms of financial freedom while populist-democratic countries tend to develop efforts to incorporate or balance other capitals also through empowerment and education as part of social and cultural capitals”.
Since I want to compare countries in Europe and Asia, this study is comparatively studying Spain and Russia as part of Europe and Japan and China as part of Asia. Four of them are developed countries so they're qualified to be compared. Russia and China have a huge area though with different populations. Both country leaders are also categorised as populist-authoritarians while Japanese and Spanish politics tend to be classified as populist-democratic countries. Thus comparing four of them will have a bigger probability to answer the research question. To generalise it better I will use the European and Asian cases collectively.
