Varieties of Welfare

Despite the considerable influence of Esping-Andersen's categorization of three "worlds" of welfare capitalism, researchers have largely neglected investigation of his dimensions of welfare state policy and politics. Building on and extending the foundations provided by Esping-Andersen, we explore the identities and consequences of welfare state regime dimensions. Our principal components analyses identify two such dimensions. The first, which we label "progressive liberalism," rearranges Esping-Andersen's separate "social democratic" and "liberal" dimensions into two poles of a single dimension. Its positive pole is characterized by extensive, universal, and homogenous benefits, active labor market policy, government employment, and gender-egalitarian family policies. The second, which we label "traditional conservatism," is similar to but broader than Esping-Andersen's conservative dimension. It features not only occupational and status-based differentiations of social insurance programs and specialized income security programs for civil servants, but also generous and long-lasting unemployment benefits, reliance on employer-heavy social insurance tax burdens, and extension of union collective bargaining coverage. Pooled cross-section time-series regressions covering 18 countries over the 1980s and 1990s suggest that progressive liberalism is associated with income redistribution and gender equality in the labor market. The principal consequence of traditional conservatism appears to be weakened employment performance. Varieties of Welfare Capitalism Despite the scale and dynamism of the Chinese economy, the contrast between capitalism and socialism has lost vigor since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Attention among comparative political economists has shifted to "varieties of capitalism." However, efforts to define and articulate these have focused on economies, or more broadly on political economies (Hall and Soskice 2001; Hicks and Kenworthy 1998; Iversen, Pontusson, and Soskice 2000; Pontusson 2003). How are we to characterize and differentiate states in affluent capitalist societies? Our interest here is in what has recently been the most commonly addressed aspect of the democratic facets of affluent capitalist nations: welfare states. Recent efforts to characterize and differentiate welfare states have been dominated by Gøsta Esping-Andersen's (1990, 1999) work, which has stimulated a visible and voluminous body of research (e.g., Castles and Mitchell 1993; Crepaz 1998; Goodin et al. 1999; Gornick 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001; Pierson 2001; Ragin 1994; Scharpf 2000; Scharpf and Schmidt 2000; Swank 2001a, 2001b). Yet this research has been almost entirely confined to Esping-Andersen's categorization of welfare states into three regimes-types, or "worlds," of welfare capitalism: the social democratic (or "socialist" as originally termed), liberal ("residual"), and conservative ("corporatist") worlds shown in Table 1. Authors debate the number of worlds of welfare capitalism and the country memberships of those worlds (Castles and Mitchell 1993; Huber and Stephens 2001; Ragin 1994; Scharpf 2000). They map trajectories of welfare policies per regime-type subpopulation (Huber and Stephens 2001). They group nations by regime-type for statistical analyses of such policies (Goodin at al. 1999; Gornick 1999; Swank 2001a, 2001b). They specify regimetype-specific explanatory theories of varied outputs and outcomes, and evolutions of welfare states (Pierson 2001; Scharpf and Schmidt 2000). They also sometimes employ Esping-Andersen's (1990) decommodification scores in discussions of theory or descriptions of their cases. However, for all its activities and vibrancy this research has largely neglected investigation of Esping-Andersen's dimensions of welfare state policy and politics. – Table 1 about here – Each of Esping-Andersen's three worlds is rooted in a specific dimension of welfare state programs. Indeed each was, in its original categorization, plucked from atop a dimension of signature policy characteristics (Esping-Andersen 1990, pp. 6977). The social democratic world is comprised of the five nations whose social insurance programs are most universalistic in coverage and homogeneous in benefit level. The liberal world includes the five countries most marked by means testing and by private (as opposed to public) health and retirement insurance. The conservative