Beyond Welfare Regimes: From Empirical Typology to Conceptual Ideal types

The welfare regime concept introduced by Gøsta Esping‐Andersen in 1990 is still widely used in comparative political research, although it has been challenged extensively both on empirical and analytical grounds. Besides the fact that many empirical welfare states seem to be hybrid cases of the established welfare regime categories, the argument that welfare regimes exist not only at the country level but also at the local level and at the level of particular welfare programmes has recently gained momentum in the academic literature. In this article, it is argued that the welfare regime concept should be stripped of its historical‐geographical connotations and turned into an ideal‐typical approach. To this end, a three‐dimensional model is proposed here that allows for analyzing the attributes of welfare states, welfare regions and welfare programmes on three analytical dimensions: welfare culture, welfare institutions and socio‐structural effects.     

The Role of Non‐profit Organizations in the Mixed Economy of Welfare‐to‐Work in the UK and Australia

This article charts the development of welfare‐to‐work policies and compares and contrasts the traditions of delivery in the UK and Australia. We find that in the UK, employment services and social security benefit administration have been dominated by the central state, traditionally affording a key role to civil servants as direct delivery agents. However, in federal Australia, mixed economies of welfare‐to‐work operate in the different states, there is a far greater role for social services and non‐profit organizations are firmly established as key providers of frontline employment services. Since the late 1990s, UK welfare reforms have been gradually following the Australian lead in contracting non‐state actors as delivery agents. As this trend seems set to continue and intensify, we examine the Australian experience in order to reflect on the role of non‐profits in policy reform.     

'Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff': A Two-dimensional Discriminant Analysis of Welfare State Regime Theory

Welfare state modelling has long been an important strand within comparative social policy. However, since the publication of Esping‐Andersen's ‘Worlds of Welfare’ typology, welfare state classification has become particularly prominent and a multitude of competing typologies and taxonomies have emerged. Each of these is based on different classification criteria, and each is trying to capture what a welfare state actually does. The result is that the literature is in a state of confusion and inertia as it is unclear which of these rival systems is currently the most accurate and should be taken forward, and which are not and should perhaps be left behind. This article extends Bonoli's two‐dimensional analysis of welfare state regimes by using multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant analysis to compare and contrast the various classifications on universal criteria. It also examines the usefulness of the two‐dimensional approach itself and suggests how it can be enhanced to benefit future attempts at holistic welfare state modelling. The article concludes that there are some welfare state classifications that are more useful than others, especially in terms of reflecting a two‐dimensional analysis: it thereby ‘sifts the wheat from the chaff’ in terms of welfare state regime theory.     

Changing Welfare Regimes in East and Southeast Asia: Crisis, Change and Challenge

The Asia‐Pacific region is a latecomer to the development of the welfare state. However, in some countries, governments have implemented ambitious programmes to extend social security systems and to enlarge the institutional structure of their welfare states. Comparative study of the welfare systems in East and Southeast Asia is, however, underdeveloped and there still is a relative lack of accurate knowledge about welfare systems in the region. Since the Asian financial crisis, more attention has been paid to the social policies of the countries. This paper examines features of welfare regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, and undertakes a systematic review of the development, levels and patterns of welfare regimes in the region. Two core questions are answered: can the existing welfare systems help mitigate the social impact of the financial and economic crisis? What are the needs, challenges and developmental perspectives that inform the future of welfare regimes in this region?     

Analyzing the Productive and Protective Dimensions of Welfare: Looking Beyond the OECD

Several theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around ‘productive welfare’. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kühner 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the welfare states of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) have a distinct bias towards the ‘productive’ rather than ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare. In this article, we build on our earlier work, utilizing fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) to explore the balance between ‘productive' and ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare state activity. Here we extend our analysis beyond the OECD, incorporating a range of nations on the ‘fringe’ of the OECD from Latin America, East Asia and the non‐OECD parts of Europe. In so doing, we contest simple notions of welfare regimes aligning with regional blocks. Primarily, however, we highlight the advantages of the ‘diversity‐orientated’ approach to data analysis that fuzzy set methods facilitate in comparison with standard quantitative techniques. In particular, we utilize FSITA to avoid data availability and reliability issues that have plagued quantitatively informed classifications of global welfare regimes. Not least, we argue FSITA allows for the contextualization of cases in a way that is sealed to quantitatively driven, comparative research. Thus, we argue FSITA has an important role to play in attempts to extend the inclusiveness of the ‘welfare modelling business’ in a manner that reflects diverse and highly significant cases beyond the Western lens that dominates the literature.     

‘Active Families’: Familization,Housing and Welfare across Generations in East Asia

Debates around welfare change have tended to concentrate on the balance between market and state provision. Although there is increasing reference to a mixed economy of welfare, this generally signifies a greater emphasis on a third sector of voluntary/community level provision. However, the family sphere has been, and still remains, an important and dynamic source of welfare provision across changing regimes and between generations. With this as background, the article addresses three particular questions. First, how has the role of families in the welfare mix changed over time? Second, how do family ‘strategies’ adapt to structural changes in order to maximize collective/individual benefits in certain areas and how do these strategies evolve over generations? Third, is such family engagement in welfare influenced by policy shifts appropriately conceptualized as ‘re‐familization’ or ‘de‐familization'? These issues are explored in the comparative socio‐economic and cultural contexts of China and Japan and draw on qualitative research with three generations of families in Shanghai and Tokyo.     

The State and its Welfare State: How do Welfare State Changes Affect the Make‐up of the Nation State?

With respect to changes in the welfare states of OECD countries, scholars most of the time are looking for common trends; that is, they look for similar movements in different states, such as welfare state retrenchment, recalibration, etc. As we show in this article, data on welfare state spending and financing do not, however, support such stark tendencies like retrenchment. We therefore suggest looking for corridor effects rather than level effects, i.e. analysing changes in the dispersion of welfare state regimes rather than shifts in the mean values. Our analysis suggests that convergence, i.e. decreasing diversity among states in spending, financing and regulation patterns, may have been the most important pattern of welfare state change in the last three decades – a pattern easily overlooked in past and current research. Convergence of welfare state regimes also affects our views on the modern nation state itself since the varieties of welfare capitalism in the twentieth century are themselves an expression of the sovereignty and autonomy of the nation state. If nation states are forced to surrender national particularities, to mellow their characteristic differences and to move incrementally towards a one‐size‐fits‐all common model via ‘shrinking corridors’, such a blurring of welfare regimes, such a beclouding of difference, should also be regarded as a significant change taking place in the centre of the Western nation state's make‐up.     

Developments in East Asian Welfare Studies

This essay in introduction is to the field of study, rather than to the present, itself distinguished, collection of papers. As such, it opens with a series of ‘flashbacks’: to the ways in which social policy, and the study of social policy, developed out of the interaction between Western welfare states (in this case Britain) and Asia Pacific. The main body of the article then charts the increasing presence of East Asian modes of welfare within comparative social policy, before going on to distinguish between the different types of approach to East Asian welfare study which have so far been adopted. Two sets of three‐part criteria have been adopted for the purposes of classification: focusing first on the dimensions (single case studies of specific countries; East Asia as a region; East Asia in comparison with other parts of the world) and second on the level of issues (matters of policy; of welfare system; of welfare regime) characteristic of each study in question. The article concludes with a restatement of its purpose: not to question the adequacy of hitherto Western (notably, Esping‐Andersen) approaches to the study of welfare regimes, but to demonstrate the need for a substantive extension to their scope.     

Varieties of Liberalism: Canadian Social Policy from the 'Golden Age' to the Present

The dominant welfare regimes approach, like the historical-institutionalism on which it draws, predicts path-dependent responses to contemporary challenges. According to this, Canada's social policy regime clearly belongs to the (mainly Anglo-American) 'liberal' family, where markets and families retain a key role, supplemented by modest state supports. Yet, as some have recognized, there are important differences among liberal regimes and within a particular welfare regime over time. There are, in other words, 'varieties of liberalism'. This article argues, moreover, that in the contemporary period Canadian welfare reform has been characterized by warring principles for redesign. While some have sought to deepen the postwar social project, the main trends have been neo-liberal restructuring and, more recently, policies inspired by 'inclusive liberalism', though less deeply than under Blair's government in the UK. The continued existence of such alternatives suggests the need for a more nuanced conception of path-dependent change, consistent with recent revisionist trends in historical-institutionalism.     

The Role of Distributional Coalitions in Welfare Regimes: Chile, Costa Rica and El Salvador

Do social policies in Latin America promote or discourage distribution? And if they do promote distribution, are coalitions a prerequisite? Drawing from a typology of welfare regimes elaborated for 18 Latin American countries, this article explores responses to these questions by addressing three emblematic cases: Chile, Costa Rica and El Salvador – that is, countries where the management of social risks primarily revolves around markets, states and families, respectively. Although the article is exploratory, findings suggest that societal coalitions have been, and are likely to continue to be, weak in market welfare regimes, strong in state welfare regimes and contingent to policy sectors in familialistic welfare regimes.     

East Asian Welfare Regimes: Testing the Hypothesis of the Developmental Welfare State

Following the three welfare regimes constructed by Esping‐Andersen, many scholars have addressed the question of whether there may be a further type of regime, differing from the categories of liberal, conservative and social democratic, pertaining to other parts of the world. Discussion has centred largely on East Asia and, in particular, on the notion of the developmental/productivist welfare regime. Yet these discussions have been based more on conceptual classification than empirical analysis. This article attempts to fill in the gap, with reference to the developmental characteristics of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. A set of 15 indicators is developed for the factor and cluster analysis of 20 countries, based on data from the 1980s and 1990s. The results indicate the existence of a new group, consisting of Taiwan and South Korea, which is distinct from Esping‐Andersen's three regimes – unlike Japan, which remains a composite of various regime types. Regime characteristics peculiar to the cases of Taiwan and South Korea include: low/medium social security expenditure, high social investment, more extensive gender discrimination in salary, medium/high welfare stratification, a high non‐coverage rate for pensions, high individual welfare loading, and high family welfare responsibility. When compared with Esping‐Andersen's three regimes, the East Asian developmental regime shows similarity with his conservative model, in respect of welfare stratification, while the non‐coverage of welfare entitlements is similar to his liberal model. There is virtually no evidence of any similarity between the developmental welfare regime and Esping‐Andersen's social democratic regime type.     

Is Sweden Being Torn Apart? Privatization and Old and New Patterns of Welfare State Support

This article examines the potential impact of institutional change on popular welfare support. The encompassing welfare state of Sweden provides an interesting case where the privatization of social service delivery has been widespread over the last decades. We use survey data from five rounds of the Swedish Welfare State Survey (1992, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2010) in order to study how public preferences for the financing and organization of welfare services have changed over time. Based on a theory describing an ideal‐typical pattern of public support for an encompassing welfare model, we derive three types of public preferences: support for a pure state model, a pure market model and a mixed model (welfare services are funded by taxes but provided by private firms). We begin by tracking the development of these ideal‐typical attitude patterns between 1992 and 2010. We then investigate how preference patterns vary across municipalities displaying different degrees of privatization of social service delivery. Our results show that welfare support among Swedes over the last decades is better characterized as dynamic rather than stable. Swedes seem to take an overall more ideologically based position on the role of the welfare state over time. The share of respondents expressing such ideologically based preferences has increased from 54 per cent in 1992 to 78 per cent in 2010. This change is principally manifested in increased support for the state and mixed models. This trend seems to be parallel to the increasing share of private welfare service providers over the last decade. We also find a link between the municipal degree of privatization and support for our three ideal‐typical welfare models. Public support for a mixed welfare model and, to some extent, a market model, is comparatively stronger in municipalities where welfare services to a large extent are carried out by private actors. Conversely, data shows that public support for the traditional Swedish state model is more widespread in municipalities having a low degree of welfare services privatization. Lastly, we discuss some theoretical implications of our findings.     

Developmental Social Policy,Social Welfare Services and the Non‐profit Sector in South Africa

The potential and challenge of constructing a democratic developmental welfare state through synergistic state‐civil society relations is the focus of this article. The author argues that while South Africa's pluralist approach, involving a leading role for the state in partnership with voluntary organizations, is a viable policy option to address the country's developmental challenges, anomalies between policy proclamations and actual practice raises questions about the efficacy of the partnership model and the gendered nature of welfare provision. Key governance issues and challenges, namely financial policies and institutional capability, underlie current failures in the delivery of welfare and care services, resulting in the non‐realization of these constitutionally guaranteed social rights. Further public action is needed to remedy the situation. Non‐profit organizations can advocate for policy reforms and challenge the instrumental nature of state‐civil relations and the abrogation of state responsibility for welfare services in contemporary South Africa.     

The Welfare Modelling Business

The paper starts out by identifying a substantial increase in the use of welfare state typologies within comparative studies. This has developed to a degree where many authors take it for granted that the world consists of a limited number of well-defined welfare regimes. This discussion took off in 1990 and it is expected to continue as an important dimension of welfare and social policy research long into the next millennium. It is shown that the idea of ordering welfare states according to ideal-typical models dates back to the late 1950s and was elaborated substantially during the early 1970s, though rather unnoticed. The publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 is identified as the starting point for what has now become a whole academic industry, here entitled the Welfare Modelling Business. Different typologies with different degrees of differentiation are discussed: should we consider welfare capitalism to come in two, three, four or more models? Though the differentiation into regimes is widely recognized, there have, of course, been many discussions about problems and shortcomings. Two major issues are elaborated: the one-sided focus on social insurance provisions and the simultaneous neglect of personal social services; and the parallel one-sided focus on state and market and the neglect of civil societal institutions such as family and networks. The paper concludes that welfare typologizing must take into account the kinds of programmes analysed: context matters.     

Towards the Disintegration of Child Welfare Services

This paper examines market issues in the provision of children's services in the light of the changing role and practice of local authorities contracting for welfare services. In adult services, where there has been a legal requirement to reorganize on market lines, the services have had to modify some of their earlier contracting practices to take account of the complex requirements of health and welfare services and it is argued that relational contracting offers a more appropriate paradigm for these. Following the implementation of the Children Act 1989, although not a requirement of the Act, many of the organizational systems in relation to markets, originally developed for adult services, have been adopted for children's services. Two areas of services for children, day care and fostering services, are discussed in order to demonstrate that these contracting systems are inappropriate and often dysfunctional for the children concerned. It is argued that there is a widening gap between contracting systems in adult and children's services which needs to be addressed. In general, it is concluded that the philosophies of the market place are flawed when applied to children's services.     

Nationalist Reframing of the Finnish and Swedish Welfare States – The Nexus of Nationalism and Social Policy in Far‐right Populist Parties

The rise of right‐wing populist parties in the Nordic countries is slowly redefining the Nordic social democratic discourse of the universal and egalitarian welfare state. The nexus of nationalism and social policy has been explored in regions and countries such as Quebec, Scotland, Belgium and the UK, but the change of discourse in the Nordic countries has received less attention. Taking the case of Sweden and Finland, this article argues that Nordic populism does not question the redistributive welfare state per se as many other European neo‐liberal far‐right parties have done. Instead, it reframes the welfare state as being linked to a sovereign and exclusive Swedish and Finnish political community with distinct national boundaries. Although Sweden and Finland largely share a common welfare nation state discourse, the article also points to important differences in the way this discourse is able to frame the welfare nation state where access to, and the design of, social services are no longer universal and egalitarian but based around ethnicity. The article aims to demonstrate this through an analysis of the welfare discourses of two populist parties: Sweden Democrats and True Finns.     

Public Opinion against Markets? Attitudes towards Market Distribution of Social Services – A Comparison of 17 Countries

This article studies how citizens view the appropriateness of market criteria for allocating services commonly associated with social citizenship rights and welfare state responsibility. The article focuses specifically on a potential role for the market in the provision of social services. The relationship between welfare policy institutions, socio‐economic class and attitudes is explored by comparing attitudes across 17 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, using multilevel modelling and data from the 2009 International Social Survey Programme. Results show that public support for market distribution of services is relatively weak in most countries, a result suggesting that public opinion is unlikely to pose a driving force within ongoing processes of welfare marketization. Still, attitudes are found to vary a lot across countries in tandem with between‐country variation in welfare policy design. First, aggregate public support for market distribution of services is stronger in countries with more private spending on services. Second, class differences in attitudes are larger in countries with more extensive state‐led delivery of services. Together, these results point to the operation of normative feedback‐effects flowing from existing welfare policy arrangements. The theoretical arguments and the empirical results presented in this article suggest that future research exploring the relationship between welfare policy and public opinion from a country‐comparative perspective is well advised to place greater focus on the market institutions that, to varying extents in different countries, act as complements to the state in the administration of social welfare.     

Do Public Officials Trust Citizens? A Welfare State Perspective

In this exploratory study, we investigate whether public sector officials and non‐public sector officials differ in the trust they have in members of society and whether this difference is associated with the welfare regime in which they work. Using survey data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey, we compare public sector officials' trust to that of non‐public sector officials in 13 countries with four different forms of welfare regimes. Our results demonstrate that public officials have a higher level of trust than non‐public officials do. Furthermore, trust among both public and non‐public sector officials is much higher in social‐democratic regimes, followed by corporatist countries, liberal regimes, Israel (as a unique case) and, lastly, southern European regimes. As expected, public officials' degree of trust reflects the general trends of their societies. Interestingly, in social‐democratic regimes, differences between trust among public and non‐public officials are the highest compared to the other regimes. In addition, an individual‐level analysis in five countries illustrative of each welfare regime indicates that while income, belonging to a minority group, and age are significant factors in explaining public officials' trust, socio‐demographic variables contribute little to the differences between public and non‐public officials. Given the critical role of trust in the functioning of the welfare state, our results imply that further awareness and mechanisms for increasing the degree of trust of citizens among public officials are warranted.     

Swedish Family Policy – Continuity and Change in the Nordic Welfare State Model

The main question addressed in this regional issue is whether or not the Nordic welfare states can still be considered a distinct welfare regime cluster given recent changes, such as the introduction of more private elements into the welfare state. The Nordic welfare states are often described as emphasizing full employment, economic and gender equality, and universal access to cradle‐to‐grave welfare state benefits and services. In the case of Sweden, often pointed to as the model of a social democratic welfare state, such elements remain intact in most aspects of the welfare state, even given the challenges presented by the global neo‐liberal economic paradigm since the 1970s. One way to determine whether or not the Nordic welfare states remain a distinct cluster is to provide an in‐depth examination of various welfare state policies in each Nordic country. To contribute to this analysis, an investigation of family policy in the Swedish context will be provided. Even given recent challenges, such as the introduction of private for‐profit childcare providers and a home care allowance, I argue that Swedish family policy has remained largely social democratic in its underlying goals, and thus acts to support the case for a distinct Nordic welfare regime cluster.     

An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business

The ‘welfare modelling business’ has become central to comparative social policy in recent years. However, we argue that one important element in this literature, the usefulness of identifying ‘ideal types’ of welfare production that support theoretical development, has been neglected. While much effort has been devoted to the results of the number and composition of the worlds, insufficient attention has been paid to the analytical basis of welfare regimes. This article attempts an audit of the ‘welfare modelling business’, with a review and consideration of the main concepts used in the literature. Our main conclusion is that definitions, concepts and methods need to be given urgent priority for the investment in the business to produce future returns.