The Rawlsian welfare state

John Rawls argues that a welfare state does not provide fair equality of opportunity and allows for large inequalities of income and wealth which endangers equal political liberties. This critique of the welfare state, however, appears to be americentristic, since it only applies to residual welfare states, such as the United States. This thesis argues that the recently revived welfare state design of targeting within universalism withstands Rawls' critique and can, therefore, be regarded as enabling a Rawlsian welfare state. As any non-utilitarian welfare state design, a Rawlsian welfare state seems to run into a problem of efficiency because it does not aim at the most efficient distribution of utility but the distribution that benefits the least-advantaged members of society most. This thesis shows, however, that a Rawlsian welfare state satisfies a subset of weak Pareto-efficiency and is, thus, as efficient as its utilitarian counterpart. Moreover, this thesis finds that Rawlsian welfare states already exist in the OECD. By building a Rawlsian welfare state index (RWSI) which represents the conformity with the principles of justice, it is shown that the association of OECD members with the cluster of targeted-universal welfare states is a significant predictor for a high RWSI score.