ABSTRACT
Welfare studies have long been unique to Europe both in content and in the nationality of scholars engaged in their study. At the same time, the scholarship which developed has been long characterised by the national specificity not only of intellectual tradition but also of welfare states themselves and their political, cultural and economic contexts. This chapter, after having synthetically delineated the Europeanness of the institutional framework in which welfare states first developed as such, its country-specific variations and the important role played by the development of comparative approaches, critically discusses what have been the focuses in welfare state studies over time as well as the theoretical and methodological debates developed around them. The final section discusses the complex role of the European Union in this field of studies, insofar as the EU is both a political actor, which interacts with national actors, and a research funding agency, which contributes to shaping research themes while incentivising international cooperation in research, thus helping create an international intellectual community.
