Israel ' s failed experiment with American-style welfare reform

Abstract

Purpose

According to convergence theory, over time societies form similar social structures, political processes and public policies. In 2001, Israel adopted a welfare reform plan that rejected the traditional strategy of passive income support and instead endorsed the concept of activation. The plan was modeled on the Wisconsin Welfare to Work program and was designed to put the long-term unemployed to work. The program began operating in four regions in 2004 but was abruptly terminated six years later. The purpose of this paper is to analyze why Israel’s welfare reform failed to follow the smooth path predicted by convergence theory and elucidates the factors in the Israeli environment that made the implementation of a program borrowed from the USA unsustainable.

Design/methodology/approach

A multi-method approach including interviews with key informants, content analysis of media materials and government documents and a quantitative comparative values analysis of four nations.

Findings

The failure of US-style welfare reform in Israel was due to four main factors: a more diverse recipient population, a lack of understanding of Israeli cultural values, a welfare population that included a substantial number of ethnic minorities whose customs conflicted with program regulations and a social movement against the program by non-profit organizations.

Originality/value

This paper demonstrates the limitations of convergence theory and highlights the salience of cultural values in the transmission of activation policies across nations. Specifically, it shows that outcomes vary when policies that are superficially similar are implanted in nations with fundamentally different cultures.

Citation

Fisher-Shalem, O. and Quadagno, J. (2016), "Israel ' s failed experiment with American-style welfare reform", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 36 No. 3/4, pp. 226-241. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-03-2015-0031