Danilova Ye. Transformations of Welfare Policy and Discourse on Social Justice in Russia. Social Sciences, 2018, Vol. 49, Issue 3, pp. 3-23.

Abstract

The author has traced the changes in welfare policy and their correlations with the ups and downs of discourse on social justice in Russia and identified its several periods: Soviet time, perestroika and reforms in post-Soviet Russia. She has analyzed the main accents and the issues discussed that figured prominently in the social agenda at each of the periods as well as the official discourse on social justice, expert opinions on the issues (social inequality, in the first place) and regimes of a social state. The social justice dispute is part of the ideological discourse and intensifies on the threshold of large-scale social changes and immediately after them. In Russia the welfare policy as a faithful reflection of domestic political struggle has changed, under pressure of exogenous and endogenous factors at each of the stages listed above, into a model that differs radically from any other model known today. It is a hybrid in which consistent orientation at the neoliberal logic of reforms is combined with the authoritarian-bureaucratic machine of state governance and a highly specific set of technologies of state regulation and distribution. Even in the periods of relative economic growth, welfare policy has not changed the situation of social inequality inherited from the early 1990s.

Авторы: