In the period following the Second World War, providing welfare to citizens became an essential feature of Western states. Immediately after the war, a new social spirit dominated Europe. Social expenditures grew rapidly and the traditional relief systems that provided assistance only to the most deprived individuals were transformed into more comprehensive systems of universal benefits through the welfare state. In the 1950s, T.H Marshall was the first to understand that this was an inevitable step in the natural evolution of the relationship between a state and its citizens.
He developed an historical argument about the role of the welfare state by arguing that its aim should not be to reach absolute equality between social classes because social inequality “provides the incentive to effort and designs the distribution of power”. Since that period, many sociologists have tried to build theoretical frameworks to analyze the welfare state in general, but little attention was paid to the structural differences of welfare states between countries. However, in the last three decades, debates on its origin, its current situation and its future have intensified, reflecting the salient role of the welfare state in social sciences. It is in this context that economists and scholars have recently attempted to classify the different types of welfare states.
The most recent and influential book on this matter is The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a book published in 1990 by Gøsta Esping-Andersen, a Danish sociologist who primarily focuses on the role of the welfare state in capitalist economies. I will first describe the model developed by Esping-Andersen, then assess its potentials and its limits. His book lays out three ideal types of welfare state regimes: liberal, conservative and social-democratic. Despite being a powerful theoretical and empirical tool, his model has been criticized for omitting major countries such as the Southern European ones and for omitting the gender-dimension.
[...] Explain the potentials and limits of Esping-Andersen three models of welfare state In the period following the Second World War, providing welfare to citizens became an essential feature of Western states. Immediately after the war, a new social spirit dominated Europe. Social expenditures grew rapidly and the traditional relief systems that provided assistance only to the most deprived individuals were transformed into more comprehensive systems of universal benefits through the welfare state. In the 1950s, T.H Marshall was the first to understand that this was an inevitable step in the natural evolution of the relationship between a state and its citizens. [...]
[...] Using the criteria of the degree of decommodification and social stratification, Esping-Andersen identifies three ideal types of welfare state regimes. In his approach, Esping-Andersen implies that the goals of the welfare state are best met with the social democratic regime since all social rights are extended to the entire population, and least met with the liberal regime because the benefits are mainly intended for the poorest portion of the population. The main advantage of the model offered by Esping-Andersen is the empirical and theoretical robustness of the three way classification. [...]
[...] Some authors have criticized Esping-Andersen's choice of the dimensions used to compare the welfare states regimes. Arts and Gelissen believe that the gender-dimension has been neglected by Esping- Andersen in his typology.[15] According to them, Esping-Andersen does not discuss the family's place in the provision of welfare and care, nor the degree of entrenchment of gender inequality in social policy. Indeed, even though they acquired civil and political rights a long time ago, women are still discriminated against in the labor market: they still do most of the unpaid domestic labor and earn less than men on average. [...]
[...] 137-158 [6] Arts, Wil and Gelissen, John, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism or More? A State-of-the-Art Report, Journal of European Social Policy, 2002, 12(2), p. 137-158 [7] Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, Three worlds of welfare capitalism (Polity Press, 2009), Chapter 1 [8] Arts, Wil and Gelissen, John, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism or More? A State-of-the-Art Report, Journal of European Social Policy, 2002, 12(2), p. 137-158 [9] Rapti, Vasiliki , The Postwar Greek Welfare Model within the Context of Southern European Welfare, in: Gro Hagemann, Reciprocity and Redistribution, pp. [...]
[...] Despite the tremendous and influential impact of Esping-Andersen on comparative social policy analysis, he received some criticism about his typology. The main criticism is about the misspecification of the Southern European welfare states.[8] Indeed, apart from claiming that Italy belongs to the corporatist regime of welfare state, Esping-Andersen did not include countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal, which are nonetheless major players in the economic and political scene currently. Following Esping- Andersen's typology, several authors have attempted to classify the Southern European welfare states models, in order to refine his typology. [...]
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