Institutions, values, and leadership in the creation of welfare states: A comparison of protective labor legislation in Britain and France, 1833--1914

This dissertation examines the development of protective labor legislation in Britain and France between 1833 and 1914. More specifically, it concentrates on two policy areas: (1) the regulation of the workday; (2) industrial safety legislation. The success of these two modes of labor protection in Britain and their failure in France constitutes the main empirical puzzle of the dissertation. This empirical puzzle is placed in the broader historical context of the development of the British and French states. The dissertation addresses the broader question of why the administratively “weak” British state emerged as a more successful regulator of labor conditions than the proverbially “strong” French state.; In the attempt to answer these questions, the author examines several theoretical approaches to the study of the welfare state, from the state-centered approach to a variety of historical and sociological-institutionalist approaches. The author finds that while state-centered and institutionalist approaches offer important insights into the development of protective labor legislation in Britain and France, these theories tend to overrate the significance of structural and institutional variables at the expense of political-cultural and leadership factors. For this reason, the author turns to the older sociological institutionalism, particularly Philip Selznick's work on leadership in administration. It is found that the leadership of the British factory inspectors and Radical politicians in the Third Republic was instrumental in forging creative syntheses of already existing ideological traditions. Such ideological syntheses based on long-standing political-cultural traditions (paternalism and utilitarianism in Britain; the republican tradition and solidarsime in France) helped legitimize state intervention in the workplace, and facilitated the formation of broad political coalitions.; The dissertation relies on a broad comparative-historical analysis to establish the validity of this explanation. The empirical argument is based on detailed archival research and a wide variety of primary sources from government documents to official reports, legislative debates, and a vast body of secondary sources from the period under examination. In addition, the dissertation synthesizes a vast amount of secondary historical literature on the subject.