| This dissertation argues that investigating the social economy is necessary to fully understand social investment politics and the specificity of the Quebec social model. Quebec has been structuring and promoting a social economy sector since the mid-1990s, launching social economy policies in areas such as child care, perinatal services, home support, social housing, and social insertion. No other provincial welfare state has taken a similar path. Why?;Given their goal to address post-industrial social needs by increasing employment levels, Quebec's social economy policies are here construed as social investment policies. Drawing from the comparative social investment literature and the Canadian federalism literature, I identify five hypotheses accounting for Quebec's distinct trajectory: power resources, cross-class coalitions, learning, structural changes, and federalism. Using a process tracing methodology and relying on a variety of documentary sources and a unique data set of 77 interviews, I argue that the strength of Quebec's Left in the mid-1990s, in combination with coalition engineering during the 1996 Economy and Employment Summit, are what chiefly account for Quebec's social economy turn. The centre-Left PQ has proven to be significantly more committed to the social economy than the centre-Right PLQ. Moreover, it was actors from the Left, including the Quebec Women's Federation and the CSN, who brought the issue of the social economy on the government's agenda. The Social Economy Task Force, launched in prevision of the 1996 Summit, then skillfully engineered a Left-Right social economy coalition based on the idea that the social economy would infringe upon neither the public, nor the private sector, while creating jobs and addressing unmet social needs. The dissertation's argument is nuanced, however. Although Quebec's social economy policies were launched en bloc, they were not quite underpinned by exactly the same causes. |
