Welfare Regimes

Abstract

Thinking in terms of “regimes” and “regime types” has become popular in comparative welfare research since the late 1980s. Originally stemming from international relations studies (Krasner 1983), the “regime” concept has been discovered for and adapted to welfare state research mainly by Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping‐Andersen, who used it in his seminal work on The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) to characterize the institutional nexus of work and welfare in advanced capitalist societies. Building on a welfare regime's capacity to reduce the market dependency of individuals (“decommodification”), its implications for the structure of social inequality (“stratification”), and the relative importance of state, market, and the family (or households) in the production of social welfare, Esping‐Andersen claimed that the modern welfare state comes in three ideal typical variants: the “liberal,” the “conservative,” and the “social democratic” model. The great advance for welfare research brought about by this regime typology is twofold. On the one hand, the “three worlds” constitute a suitable tool for bringing order into the complex “real world” of welfare capitalism. On the other hand, and when it comes to specify the differences between advanced welfare states, the concept of welfare regimes focuses not simply on social expenditure data but on the qualitative aspects of welfare state policies, i.e., on the welfare state's relevance as a means of ordering social relations according to specific ideological convictions and normative principles. According to Esping‐Andersen, the relative weight of “liberal,” “conservative,” and/or “social democratic” convictions and principles in different national welfare regimes today depends on the power resources with which the respective social movements were able to engage in the “democratic class struggle” (Korpi 1983) around the welfare state, its emergence and its design, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.