Abstract
When it comes to assessing the status of the welfare state or the necessity of political reforms, in many countries the middle class serves as a major point of reference. In such debates, the middle class and the welfare state typically constitute an ambivalent relationship as the middle class is both financing and benefiting from the systems of social security. The middle class is therefore a particularly important target group to secure the functioning of social policies and the long-term stability of welfare institutions. At the same time, however, the socio-structural boundaries, the interests and the normative meaning of “the middle class” are not objectively given but find their way into political discourses and decisions through specific ways of perception and interpretation. As regards the design of social policies, “the middle class” can therefore be expected to serve as a major landmark for political orientation while at the same time it is open to a variety of meanings. Starting from here, the chapter investigates for the case of Germany how, firstly, “the middle class” becomes a meaningful discursive category in public debates and, secondly, how these discourses leave their marks in the design of social policies. By building on newspaper articles, we aim at identifying the discursive practices of constructing “the middle class” which then function as a major yardstick in political processes, both as an explicit target of welfare policies and as an implicit point of reference for negotiating “appropriate” policy designs.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.wiwo.de/my/politik/deutschland/wohlstand-das-schwinden-der-mittelschicht/13540392.html (accessed on 2 June 2016). All quotations from German sources are the author’s translations.
- 2.
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article155110496/Der-schleichende-Tod-der-deutschen-Mittelschicht.html (accessed on 2 June 2016).
- 3.
http://www.diw.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=diw_01.c.533695.de (accessed on 2 June 2016).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Politics, book IV. For a contemporary intellectual adaption of this Aristotelian argument in the German discourse see Münkler 2014, pp. 50–51.
- 7.
“Mitte und Maß” is a popular saying which translates as “the doctrine of the mean” and thus identifies the middle ground as the moderate (cf. Münkler 2014).
- 8.
In a similar vein and on a more abstract level, Stone (2012, p. 191) argues that middles and averages often become norms in politics by conveying notions of normality, decency and acceptability. From the perspective of hegemonic theory, the idea of a middle ground (as exemplified e.g. in third way discourses) could also be read as a hegemonic arrangement that implies an overcoming of assumedly antiquated left-right-ideologies and thus turns political conflicts into mere technical problems (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, pp. xiv–xv; see also Bastow and Martin 2003).
- 9.
For an analysis of the concept of “Soziale Marktwirtschaft” in the hegemonic discourse in post-war Germany see Nonhoff (2006).
- 10.
During the 1990s, the Social Democratic Party of Germany discovered “the new middle” (Die Neue Mitte) as their basic political orientation and strategic label. The idea was heavily influenced by the third way discourse of New Labour in the United Kingdom which claimed a middle ground between a neoliberal market economy and an encompassing welfare state as promoted by “classic” social democracy. In 1998, the social democrats under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder emerged victorious from the general elections and replaced the liberal-conservative government by forming a coalition with the Green Party (Braunthal 1999).
- 11.
See Haus and Lamping (2010) and their reference to exit, voice and choice as design principles connected to widely shared perceptions of middle class orientations.
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Barbehön, M., Haus, M. (2018). How Central Is the Middle? Middle Class Discourses and Social Policy Design in Germany. In: Barrault-Stella, L., Weill, PE. (eds) Creating Target Publics for Welfare Policies. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89596-3_3
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