ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the need and utility of typologies for the comparative analysis of welfare capitalism. There exist various typologies, such as Castles’s (1993) classification of different ‘families of nations’ that was developed to capture and express similarities between countries’ public policies, based on common cultural, historical, and geographical features. The best-known and most prolific classification of types of capitalism (rather than welfare) is Hall and Soskice’s (2001) distinction between different production regimes, labelled the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach. However, the field of comparative welfare state research is dominated by, and greatly indebted to, the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen, whose landmark study The Three World of Welfare Capitalism (1990) completely revolutionized the way social scientists look at the welfare state. Two innovations were particularly powerful. First, he introduced the concept of a welfare regime that allowed a much broader and better understanding of how the major institutions of society (state, market, and family) interacted to produce work and welfare. In this way he not only helped to remove the field’s exclusive and theoretically unsatisfying preoccupation with the state and social spending, but also opened up a whole new area for innovative research. Second, he not only introduced, documented, and explained the qualitative variation in welfare regimes (as the dependent variable), but also showed how these regimes (as the independent variable) were systematically related to differences in social outcomes that really matter, particularly in terms of the differential structuring of post-industrial employment trajectories. Much intellectual effort has been invested in further developing, testing, adjusting, expanding,
criticizing, and, in various ways, applying the regime typology as a classificatory and heuristic research tool. Arts and Gelissen (2010, p. 569) recently argued that the regime typology has become a paradigmatic one. On the basis of their review of empirical studies that use Esping-Andersen’s regime typology they conclude ‘ … in spite of all kinds of conceptual, operationalization, and data problems that must be solved – that his typology is promising enough for work to continue on welfare state models’ (p. 581). They add, however, that further progress will very much hinge on the ability to devise a firmer theoretical foundation of contemporary and future welfare state models as explanatory categories. This resonates well with Powell and Barrientos’s (2011) thesis that welfare state research has not focused enough on further theorizing. I agree with these positions, although the contours of better theorizing have not yet been outlined. Also,
I am somewhat concerned about the confusion between empirical typologies and ideal-types (see Chapter 29) that continues to exist and that may stand in the way of the desired theoretical progress. This chapter aims to explain the intellectual background of the regime typology, discusses the criteria for good typologies, critically re-examines and evaluates the operationalization of the three-worlds typology, and discusses how to distinguish between relevant and not-so-relevant criticisms of typologies.
