Welfare regimes of European countries and their development in the context of membership in the European Union

Abstract

Welfare regimes represent potential approaches to the implementation of redistributive policies worldwide. In European countries, several significant regimes have been identified, including the Conservative, Southern, Social Democratic, Liberal model, the Post-Communist European model, and the Model of the Former USSR. The present study focused on identifying the welfare regimes of EU members and candidate countries and examining whether shifts between these regimes occur over time. The k-means method was employed, generating a different number of clusters for two observed periods: 2013 and 2022 on the sample of 27 member and 4 candidate countries and 2023 on the sample of 27 member countries of EU. The input variables consisted of redistributive indicators focusing on income inequality and the risk of poverty. The analysis results confirmed that countries transitioned between regimes in all observed periods. In the mixed group of member and candidate countries, the number of clusters decreased from five to two. For member countries in 2023, the number of clusters was three, mainly due to the worsening risk of poverty in some countries. Notably, none of the clusters represented a pure form of the originally defined welfare regimes. A significant finding of the study was that all observed EU candidate countries have shifted towards the redistributive policies of EU member states. This shift was noted towards regimes of geographically proximate countries. Within the member countries, however, the adopted measures have also lead to the negative phenomenon of mutual distancing of social regimes.