Abstract
This paper examines different models of disability policy in European welfare regimes on the basis of secondary data. OECD data measuring social protection and labour-market integration is complemented with an index which measures the outcomes of disability civil rights. Eurobarometer data is used to construct the index. The country modelling by cluster analysis indicates that an encompassing model of disability policy is mainly prevalent in Nordic countries. An activating and rehabilitating disability-policy model is predominant mainly in Central European countries, and there is evidence for a distinct Eastern European model characterized by relatively few guaranteed civil rights for disabled people. Furthermore, the Southern European model, which indicates a preference for social protection rather than activation and rehabilitation, includes countries which normally have diverse welfare traditions.
Highlights
In industrialized western countries between one in five and one in seven people live with a disability or chronic illness (OECD 2010, 22)
Including all three dimensions, the analysis suggests that European welfare regimes have four distinct disability-policy models
The disability category has a strong welfare state dimension and the category is the fundament of a need-based distribution system (Stone 1984, 21), and there is the significant danger of marginalization from the labour market for disabled people (Barnes and Mercer 2005, 541)
Summary
In industrialized western countries between one in five and one in seven people live with a disability or chronic illness (OECD 2010, 22). A body of empirical literature compares the disability policies of more than two welfare regimes, either within a three-dimensional framework (Maschke 2008; Waldschmidt 2009) or with a larger recognition of a redistributive and regulative mix (Barnes 2000; Cohu, LequetSlama, and Velche 2005; Drake 1999; Hvinden 2003) Another important observer’s approach (OECD 2010, 2003) reduces the complexity of disability policy to its meta-dimensions, but it operationalizes only two of them: social protection and labourmarket integration. Waldschmidt (2009) provides an in-depth analysis that gives meaningful insight into the relationship between a welfare regime and its disability-policy orientation, but the argument relies on a qualitative document analysis and a quantitative comparison of the distribution of the dimension relative to that of other countries is not possible Because it has another structure, the data provided by the OECD (2010) allow this kind of quantitative modelling approach. The fifth part includes a discussion of the results and a critical assessment of the limitations of this quantitative approach
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