Mainstream welfare state variations

Abstract

During the past two decades mainstream scholarship on the welfare state has been characterized by a growing interest in comparing welfare states and social policies in an effort to distinguish between types of welfare state and to identify key dimensions of variation. This chapter addresses the issue of which dimensions of variation have been central to the comparative analysis of welfare states and social policy. Initially it looks at a number of important discussions on welfare state typologies and models of social policy in order to establish how dimensions of variation have been defined, and to flesh out the pros and cons of various approaches. My purpose is to construct a framework for comparison which is subsequently applied to the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This comparison provides an initial understanding of the similarities, the range of differences, and the distinctive features of social provision in the four countries. It also sets in sharp relief the limitations of mainstream analysis of welfare state variations, which fails to shed much light on our major questions of investigation: what differences do welfare state variations make for women? And how similar or dissimilar is the impact of welfare state policies on women and men in the four countries? Welfare state typologies and dimensions of variation Four approaches have figured prominently in the mainstream discussion on types of welfare state and welfare state variations. The first examines specific countries with the purpose of describing their distinctive features (e.g. Furniss and Tilton 1977, Rainwater et al. 1986, Esping-Andersen and Korpi 1987, Davidson 1989).