The worlds of welfare: illusory and gender blind?

Abstract

The nature of welfare state regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This paper engages with two aspects of this debate; the gender critique of Esping-Andersen's thesis, and Kasza's (2002) assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare state regimes. It presents a gender-focused defamilisation index and contrasts it with Esping-Andersen's decommodification index to illustrate that, whilst individual welfare states have been shown to exhibit internal variety across different policy areas, they are both consistent and coherent in terms of their policy variation by gender. It concludes, in contrast to both the gender critique of Esping-Andersen, and Kasza's rejection of the regimes concept, that the ‘worlds of welfare’ approach is therefore neither gender blind or illusory, and can, if limited to the analysis of specific areas such as labour market decommodification or defamilisation, be resurrected as a useful means of organising and classifying welfare states.

Welfare state regimes and differences in self-perceived health in Europe: A multilevel analysis

“…The state is used to promote social equality through a redistributive social security system. There has been extensive scholarly debate about the theoretical and empirical value of the Three Worlds typology (for a detailed summary see Arts & Gelissen, 2002or Bambra, 2006b) and as a result of this, modified or alternative typologies have been proposed by others (Bambra C., 2004(Bambra C., , 2005a(Bambra C., , 2005bBonoli, 1997;Castles & Mitchell, 1993;Korpi & Palme, 1998;Navarro et al, 2006), most of which place emphasis on those characteristics of welfare states not extensively examined by Esping-Andersen or which cover more countries. Ferrera"s (1996) four-fold typology, which focuses on different dimensions of how social benefits are granted and organised, has been highlighted as one of the most empirically accurate welfare state regime typologies (Bambra, 2007a).…”

“…Furthermore, the welfare state is important to population health in terms of how the state interacts with the family structure (Hatland, 2001), and thereby reduces the welfare burden on families and/or women (the state de-familises the family/women) (Bambra, 2004(Bambra, , 2007bEsping-Andersen, 1999;Korpi, 2000).…”

Defamilisation measures and women's labour force participation – a comparative study of twelve countries

“…Proponents of this interpretation are concerned about how women could reduce the economic importance of the family in their lives (Bambra, 2004(Bambra, , 2007Chau et al, 2016). This idea is indebted to Lister's (1994, p. 37) notion of defamilisation:…”

“…These two variables can be seen as input indicators in the defamilisation index developed by Bambra (2007). They indicate whether women are given sufficient welfare support when they have children (Bambra, 2004). Since the entitlement to these benefits is usually based on citizenship (and work status), women are not necessarily required to negotiate with their family members in claiming these benefits (Chau et al, 2016).…”

“…Feminist analysts argue that the study of the decommodification of labour gives insufficient consideration to the difficulties faced by women in the pursuit of paid employment (Lister, 1994;Orloff, 1993). For many women family responsibilities present a challenge to their capacity to undertake paid employment (Bambra, 2004(Bambra, , 2007Orloff, 1993;Saraceno and Keck, 2010). One of the solutions to this problem is to provide measures to assist women to earn income from the paid labour market.…”