The Place of National Systems of Social Protection and Political Representation in Socio-Economic Regulation: A Morphogenetic Structuralist View on Institutional Change in Comparative Perspective with Special References to Japan and France

The paper addresses the issue of rethinking the welfare state as a part of a broader national system of social protection (NSSP) and a mode of societal regulation. In order to overcome the theoretical limits of bottom-up comparative analysis of welfare states, one builds a structural model of such a NSSP, inspired by french “régulation” theory. In this model, the nucleus of every NSSP is composed of three specific relationships bounding the economic and the political orders to the domestic sphere via the mediation of specific institutions: first a relationship of economic consubstantiality (social insurance for example), second a relationship of political alliance with the State (the welfare-state), third a relation of protection of the domestic order (the mix of social insurance benefits and public assistance allocations that insures the reproduction of life chances of the individual in the family framework). But a fourth relation must be introduced in the model in order to loop it dynamically, namely the wage-labor relation, or more widely, the set of market coverages of domestic life (wage, fringe benefits, private insurances, savings). The model is used to obtain a logical typology and a set of ideal-types of NSSP that add to the usual threefold clustering of Welfare States a fourth type exemplified by Japan. Then, building the same type of structural model for the national system of political representation (NSPR), and examining the institutional complementarities between NSSP and NSPR, one defines different national modes of societal regulation among which the Japanese configuration of its social and political institutions appears as one of the ideal-types. Finally, focusing on the French case, one examines, through the concepts of societal coherence and hybridization, how institutional change can be grasped in the framework of this theoretical approach of societal regulation.