Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments April 6, 2021 erstellt
Beschreibung:
While most comparative studies on welfare systems rely on the Three Worlds of Welfare (TWW) classification by Esping-Andersen as a benchmark, the representativeness of such taxonomy has been questioned due to the profound changes that have characterized welfare systems. A growing body of literature has favored the analysis of welfare typologies limited to sub-areas of welfare provision, as opposed to considering several policy areas at once (welfare state as-a-whole), in response to the concern that welfare services do not necessarily share a common rationale across policy areas. Still, there is little evidence on the extent to which such policy-specific welfare typologies are (i) consistent with the standard welfare classifications (the TWW); and (ii) consistent across policy areas.In this paper, we perform a meta-analysis of 22 studies which identified welfare typologies in Europe focusing on economically relevant areas such as healthcare and social care policies. We build a novel index of “welfare similarity” to measure the extent to which welfare systems have been grouped together in previous studies, separately for both policy areas. Our findings are twofold: on the one hand, we highlight the coexistence and overlap of multiple regimes in both healthcare and social care policies, which results in a hybridization of the original TWW classification. On the other hand, we find that countries classifications are substantially different between healthcare and social care policies, which provides evidence for the lack of coherence of welfare provision rationales across policy areas. Our results are important for both the academic and policy debate. They suggest that classifications of welfare systems should enhance their focus on the developments in policy-specific welfare areas, which are not necessarily in line with standard classifications. Hence, comparative analysis focusing on policy-specific welfare typologies may prove more informative to policymakers than general classification of the welfare state as-a-whole