The three worlds of welfare capitalism revisited

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2012.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2012.18 - ISSN : 1955-611XWe introduce a new way to model the Bismarckian social insuance system, stressing its corporatist dimension. Comparing the Beveridgean, Bismarckian and Liberal systems according to the majority voting rule, we show that for a given distribution of risks inside society, the Liberal system wins if the inequality of income is low, and the Beveridgean system wins if the inequality of income is high. Using a utilitarian criterion, the Beveridgean system always dominates and the Bismarckian system is preferred to the Liberal one.Dans cet article, nous introduisons la dimension corporatiste dans la modélisation du système de protection sociale à la Bismarck. En comparant les systèmes beveridgien, bismarckien et libéral selon la règle de vote à la majorité, nous montrons que pour une distribution donnée des risques à l'intérieur de la société, le système libéral, est préféré si l'inégalité des revenus est faible, et le système beveridgien est préféré si l'inégalité de revenu est élevée. Sous un critère utilitariste, le système beveridgien domine toujours et le système bismarckien est préférable au système libéral

Comparing dispositifs in Bismarckian Welfare States

Comparative research on welfare states is facing various pitfalls in our days. This article is concerned with a particularly tricky issue by considering scholastic effects of thinking welfare provision in terms of typologies, such as the one developed by Esping-Andersens in his study on The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

The lost and the new 'liberal world' of welfare capitalism : a critical assessment of Gøsta Esping-Andersen's the three worlds of welfare capitalism a quarter century later

Celebrating the 25th birthday of Gøsta Esping-Andersen's seminal book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), this article looks back at the old ‘liberal world’ and examines the new. In so doing, it contributes to debates and the literature on liberal welfare state development in three main ways. First, it considers the concept of ‘liberalism’ and liberal ideas about welfare provision contained within Three Worlds. Here we are also interested in how liberal thought has conceptualised the (welfare) state, and the class-mobilisation theory of welfare-state development. Second, the article elaborates on ‘neo-’liberal social reforms and current welfare arrangements in the English-speaking democracies and their welfare states. Finally, it considers the extent to which the English-speaking world of welfare capitalism is still meaningfully ‘liberal’ and coherent today

Children and the Welfare State: The Need for a Child-Centered Analysis

Variation in child well-being across rich Western nations suggests that the welfare state may play a role in shaping child well-being. However, welfare scholars have largely overlooked children in their analyses. This paper seeks to bring children to the center of welfare state analysis by examining how comparative welfare state theory can consider child well-being. The paper begins with an examination of Esping- Andersen’s seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, which has come to frame welfare state analysis for nearly three decades. Next, the paper explores the main critiques of Esping-Andersen’s work, with special attention paid to the feminist critique and the construction of alternative feminist and family policy regimes. Finally, this paper extends and reworks Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds to offer a new framework for conducting child-centered welfare state analyses

Central and eastern european social model

The 10 former communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe have inherited similar social protection systems, specific to an ethatist economy, and faced similar issues along the transition to market economy. Distinct in Europe through common traits, the new-comers in the European Union, especially the 10 from Central and Eastern Europe, encompass the fifth submodel of the European social model. Ageing of the population, conservatory management of the pensions fund (aversion for risk, regarding the public funds transfer into private pensions fund), migration of qualified work force, increasing unemployment rate represent a wide variety of threats which brought to the public attention the need to reform the social model of the post-communist countries.European Social Model; European Social Policy; comparative social policy; welfare state; Central and Eastern Europe;

The worlds of welfare: Illusory and gender-blind?

The nature of welfare state regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This paper engages with two aspects of this debate; the gender critique of Esping-Andersen's thesis, and Kasza's (2002) assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare state regimes. It presents a gender-focused defamilisation index and contrasts it with Esping-Andersen's decommodification index to illustrate that, whilst individual welfare states have been shown to exhibit internal variety across different policy areas, they are both consistent and coherent in terms of their policy variation by gender. It concludes, in contrast to both the gender critique of Esping-Andersen, and Kasza's rejection of the regimes concept, that the ‘worlds of welfare’ approach is therefore neither gender blind or illusory, and can, if limited to the analysis of specific areas such as labour market decommodification or defamilisation, be resurrected as a useful means of organising and classifying welfare states

Exploring Malta's welfare model

The paper compares the Maltese welfare state with other mainstream welfare regimes. It makes use of Esping-Andersen’s concepts of decommodification and stratification, whilst also looking at political and ideological factors. The European context in general, as analyzed by Roche, and the Southern European context in particular, as analyzed by Ferrera, are given particular attention. For this purpose, qualitative interviewing and analysis of secondary data was analysed through a sociological perspective. The paper argues that Malta has a hybrid model which does not neatly fit in one particular model of welfare. Indeed it has similarities and differences with other welfare models such as the Liberal, Social-Democratic, Continental and Southern European. However Malta must also keep in line with targets set by the European Union, which in turn are likely to influence Malta’s welfare model.peer-reviewe