An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business

Powell, Martin; Barrientos, Armando

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9515.2010.00754.x

Cited by 78 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(127 reference statements)

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“…As noted by several authors [17, 18], the welfare modelling business has become a central part of welfare state research, starting with Esping-Andersen's famous trichotomy that he labelled on the basis of main political ideologies: the liberal, social-democratic, and conservative/corporatist regimes. The idea behind the regime approach goes beyond the welfare state in the stricter sense by looking at the nexus of the state, markets, and family.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Temporal and Cross-National Poverty and Mortality Rates among Developed Countries

Fritzell

Kangas

Hertzman

et al. 2013

Journal of Environmental and Public Health

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A prime objective of welfare state activities is to take action to enhance population health and to decrease mortality risks. For several centuries, poverty has been seen as a key social risk factor in these respects. Consequently, the fight against poverty has historically been at the forefront of public health and social policy. The relationship between relative poverty rates and population health indicators is less self-evident, notwithstanding the obvious similarity to the debated topic of the relationship between population health and income inequality. In this study we undertake a comparative analysis of the relationship between relative poverty and mortality across 26 countries over time, with pooled cross-sectional time series analysis. We utilize data from the Luxembourg Income Study to construct age-specific poverty rates across countries and time covering the period from around 1980 to 2005, merged with data on age- and gender-specific mortality data from the Human Mortality Database. Our results suggest not only an impact of relative poverty but also clear differences by welfare regime that partly goes beyond the well-known differences in poverty rates between welfare regimes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Temporal and Cross-National Poverty and Mortality Rates among Developed Countries

Fritzell

Kangas

Hertzman

et al. 2013

Journal of Environmental and Public Health

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“…In this literature, the Conservative World is sometimes referred to as corporatist or christian-democratic. These are 'ideal types': heuristic devices against which no real World of Welfare Capitalism or country as the unit of analysis actually conforms to (Powell and Barrientos, 2011). Nevertheless, some OECD countries come much closer than others and can be considered prototypical.…”

Section: Different Worlds Of Welfare Capitalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and Wellbeing: A Multilevel Analysis

Deeming

Hayes²

2012

J. Soc. Pol.

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Social scientists in the comparative policy tradition have long argued that welfare systems in modern capitalist societies can be broken down into ideal types. The idea of different worlds of welfare capitalism has an enduring appeal and growing practical policy relevance as governments seek to enhance population wellbeing. In this paper, we explore the worlds of welfare theory from the perspective of happiness. Drawing on data from the World Values Survey, we examine how welfare regimes may contribute to wellbeing and we consider the significance of our findings for the development of social policy. By using multilevel models, it is possible to separate out effects due to observed and unobserved, as well as both individual-level and country-level, welfare state characteristics and we can make inferences to the distribution of social wellbeing across welfare typologies. We find that respondents living in liberal and conservative countries experience at least twice the odds of unhappiness of those living in social democracies, after controlling for individual-and country-level explanatory variables. The observed differences between the worlds of welfare were found to be highly statistically significant.

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“…What we end up with the Schubert et al approach is a complete loss of analytical power without real gains in terms of empirical accuracy (see Arts and Gelissen 2010: 581). 6 We think that the confusion about typologies versus ideal types has added to the limited progress in terms of developing a stronger theoretical foundation of contemporary and future welfare state models as explanatory categories (Arts and Gelissen 2010;Powell and Barrientos 2011). First, as we showed in the previous section, instead of trying to arrive at novel theoretical insights, the lion share of studies addresses empirical questions that are answerable within the paradigm.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Three worlds’ typology: Moving beyond normal science?

Kersbergen

Vis²

2015

Journal of European Social Policy

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There is no doubt that Esping-Andersen's three worlds' typology has been extremely valuable.However, the literature inspired by it shows signs of Kuhnian normal science, which is impairing empirical and theoretical progress. We explain normal science, demonstrate that it characterizes recent empirical regime studies and ask why this has come about. We show that the welfare regime literature has a tendency to confuse the terms 'typology' and 'ideal-types'. This has prevented the emergence of anomalies that are needed for progress. We argue that normal science is fostered by the combination of researchers' tendency to prefer certainty (e.g. to address solvable research problems) and the environmental pressures they face (especially the 'publish or perish' culture and the need to frame research problems in terms of variation rather than similarity). In the discussion section, we suggest several routes by which the welfare state literature can move beyond normal science.

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An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business

Cited by 78 publications

References 56 publications

Cross-Temporal and Cross-National Poverty and Mortality Rates among Developed Countries

Cross-Temporal and Cross-National Poverty and Mortality Rates among Developed Countries

Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and Wellbeing: A Multilevel Analysis

Three worlds’ typology: Moving beyond normal science?

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