When: Monday, 6 November 2023, 17:00
Where: Hybrid event - Konferenzraum, Department for Poltical Science, NIG, 2nd floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, and online via Zoom
Speaker: Ellen Stewart (Strathclyde)
Moderation: Katharina Paul (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Discussant: Katharina Kieslich (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Abstract
Quantitative studies of public opinion have argued that there is a ‘healthcare discrepancy’ (Bambra, 2005) in public attitudes to welfare state spending: population attitudes towards spending on healthcare diverge from those towards other welfare state functions. This is attributed to factors including the socio-cultural status of medicine in societies, and to the less stigmatised character of ill-health compared to conditions such as poverty or unemployment. In How Britain Loves the NHS (Stewart, 2023) I offer an analysis of this phenomenon in the UK context, where the socio-cultural significance of the NHS has grown sharply in recent years. This is often seen as problematic because the NHS becomes a proxy for exclusionary nationalist sentiment (Fitzgerald, Hinterberger, Narayan, & Williams, 2020), but also because public support for the NHS might encourage politicians to protect NHS budgets at the expense of other public services which might prevent ill-health. This paper discusses not how much the British public loves the NHS, but the modalities and dimensions of that affection. I consider how public affection for the NHS might be conceptualised, not as a vampiric threat to the wider welfare state, but as a valuable exemplar of how public services might act as solidarity-generating machines within society.
Link to the online participation via Zoom
