Welfare Politics: Building Welfare Institutions

The first generation of the welfare debates has focused on articulating the main drive which leads the development of the welfare state. They mainly exploit political or economic variables, such as industrialization (Wilensky and Lebaux 1958; Wilensky 1975), power resources mobilization of labor class (Korpi 1983; Esping-Andersen 1985), or roles of states (Flora and Alber 1981; Skocpol and Amenta 1986; Orloff and Skocpol 1984). Political or economic factors mentioned above do influence welfare development. However, their explanatory capacity is limited to the quantitative expansion of the welfare state and cannot confront the historical variety or detailed historiography of the welfare states (Esping-Andersen 1990, 13–17, 106–107). Due to this foible, the second generation, from the qualitative dimension, mainly explores the diversity of the welfare states and opens up a new field of cross-national comparison on the welfare regimes, that is, “welfare regime typology business” (Abrahamson 1999). The welfare regime refers to “the combined, inter-dependent way in which welfare is produced and allocated between state, market, and family” (Esping-Andersen 1999, 34). That is to say, the welfare regime can be identified with its distinct welfare mixture of state, market, and family. Since Esping-Andersen’s ambitious works in 1990 and 1999, researchers have tried to identify the distinct welfare mix of one country or a specific region. Their comparative research outcomes have served not only as snapshots for the cross-national variance in welfare regimes of capitalist CHAPTER 2