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4 - Welfare State Regimes

Why Did We Get Different Worlds of Welfare and Do We Still Have Them?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Kees van Kersbergen
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Barbara Vis
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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Summary

Introduction

In Chapter 3, we discussed the rationales or logics of the welfare state in order to grasp its various driving forces. So far, we have largely abstracted from the substantial empirical differences between welfare states. This chapter explains that there is no such thing as the welfare state, but that there are distinctive worlds of welfare. We analyze the differences between welfare states and their social and political origins, foundation, and development. We ask two big questions: (1) why did we get different worlds of welfare, and (2) do we still have them? Answering these questions enables us to understand welfare state variation.

The field of comparative welfare state research is dominated by, and greatly indebted to, the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen, whose landmark study TheThree Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) revolutionized the way social scientists look at the welfare state. Two innovations were particularly powerful. First, Esping-Andersen introduced the concept of a welfare regime that allowed a much broader and better understanding of the variety of ways in which the major institutions of society (state, market, and family) interacted to produce specific patterns of work and welfare. In this way he not only helped to remove the field’s exclusive and theoretically unsatisfying preoccupation with social spending as the indicator of welfare state generosity (for a discussion of this so-called dependent variable problem, see Green-Pedersen 2004 and Clasen and Siegel 2007) but also opened up a whole new area for systematic comparative research. Second, Esping-Andersen introduced, documented, and explained the qualitative variation in welfare regimes (as the dependent variable), showing how these regimes (as the independent variable) were systematically related to differences in social outcomes that really matter, particularly in terms of employment structure and labor market behavior – and recently also at the micro-level of welfare state outcomes (e.g., Kammer et al. 2012).

Type
Chapter
Information
Comparative Welfare State Politics
Development, Opportunities, and Reform
, pp. 53 - 77
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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