That's a good point and there seem to exist different understandings of the term in different countries. I do wonder where this comes from. In Germany Sozialismus is always understood in the marxist sense and it is furthermore inseperable from the political system of the German Democratic Republic. I am not privy to the finer points of the French Socialist's political agenda, but from my understanding they roughly resemble our Social Democrats.
It's because most communist parties in the Eastern Block were initially (or even always) called socialist parties. And many Eastern Block countries were named "socialist republics".
Heck, U S S R.
Well, North Korea (and many other dictatorships) are technically "democratic republics"... Doesn't mean that they are.
True, and so were all the socialist regimes I mentioned. But after tens of years of propaganda by the communists, the name tends to stick. After the fall of communism, it sticks in a bad way: socialism = communism.
I think that the best people to ask are those that lived under "socialist" regimes (I'm one of them). If I ask almost anybody I know that lived under a socialist regime, they'll probably say the same.
Maybe theoretically socialism is a different thing, but practically it really isn't for a lot of people.
It feels strange to me to call social welfare anything other than socialism. Maybe it's just a case of French socialisme and English socialism being false friends.