ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the analysis of welfare state development has focused on ‘welfare effort’, i.e. the amount of money that a state is willing to devote to social expenditures. The justified criticism of this type of quantitative studies was that the concentration on spending data does not necessarily provide convincing information on the more qualitative differences between welfare state regimes. As an alternative, Esping-Andersen (1990) has argued that a crucial concept for understanding welfare state variations is ‘decommodification’. This concept addresses the commodity form of labour under capitalist market conditions, where workers sell their labour power on the market. The extent to which workers depend on the market defines their degree of commodification (Esping-Andersen 1985a:31, 1990:37; Western 1989:202).
