Alain Noël - Department of Political Science

Chair’s Speaker Series
Alain Noël
(Professor of Political Science, Université de Montréal)
The Case for Welfare State Universalism,
or the Lasting Relevance of the
Paradox of Redistribution
Monday, April 4, 2016
2:00 – 4:00 p.m., 3037 SSH
Alain Noël is professor of political science at the Université de Montréal (www.alainnoel.ca).
He works on social policy in a comparative perspective, as well as on federalism and on
Quebec and Canadian politics. His main book, co-authored with Jean-Philippe Thérien, is
Left and Right in Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008). The book won the
2009 International Relations Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association. His most
recent book, co-edited with Miriam Fahmy, is Miser sur l’égalité: l’argent, le pouvoir, le bienêtre et la liberté (Fides, 2014). Between 2006 and 2014, Alain Noël was president of the
Centre d’étude sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion of the Quebec government. Previously, he was
also a member of Quebec’s Commission on Fiscal Imbalance, and a visiting professor at the
Institut d’études politiques de Grenoble, at the Institut d’études politiques de Lyon and at the
School of Social Welfare of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2013-14, he was
president of the Canadian Political Science Association.
How can we best achieve equality and social justice? Should we target social programs to help those most in need, or provide
more or less the same universal benefits to all citizens? This is an old and enduring question, pivotal to the politics of the welfare
state. In an influential article published in 1998, Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme seemed to settle the debate. They demonstrated
convincingly that equality was best served by universal programs. There was, they argued, a paradox of redistribution: a country
redistributed more when it took from all to give to all than when it sought to soak the rich to help the poor. In recent years,
however, a number of studies (Kenworthy, 2011; Marx et al, 2013; Brady and Bostic, 2015) replicated Korpi and Palme’s
analysis and found that their findings no longer held. This paper (written with Olivier Jacques) revisits the question from a
different perspective. We argue that Korpi and Palme’s argument was theoretically sound but inadequately operationalized. We
propose a new measure of universalism in OECD countries and test its impact on redistribution with a more demanding timeseries cross-sectional analysis. We find that the case for welfare state universalism remains convincing, even in the 21st century.