ABSTRACT
There seem to be two paths in providing an answer to the question whether, to what extent and under what conditions Christian democracy fosters a distinctive welfare state regime. A first answer is that it is not so much politics or politically generated institutional settings that matter in explaining cross-national qualitative differences between welfare state regimes, but rather it is cultural variables that are of consequence. This idea comes very close to the reasoning behind the families of nations hypothesis (Castles 1993). Families of nations are defined in terms of ‘shared geographical, linguistic, cultural and/or historical attributes and leading to distinctive patterns of public policy outcomes’ (Castles 1993:xiii). The conjecture then would be that nations that (partly) fall within the Catholic belt of continental Europe and that share the common cultural heritage of Catholicism will most likely be quite similar in their configuration of market, state and family. Prima facie, the analysis presented here provides evidence that this is empirically plausible. Catholicism furnishes a common core of social policy characteristics around which various regimes within the Catholic group tend to converge.
