was always a matter of urgency that social policy studies should break away from a narrow preoccupation with single countries. Some of the early attempts to do this simply drew upon information from a narrow sample of countries, putting accounts of policies alongside each other in separate chapters in a way that announced ‘other places are different and that is interesting’. The rise in interest in the spread of policies from country to country in the frame of ‘policy borrowing’ or ‘policy transfer’ (Rose, 1993; Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996, 2000) also stimulated attention towards similarities and differences between countries in the form of questions about why some transfers worked and some failed (or involved radical transformations). But there is a more fundamental reason why a systematic approach to comparison is important. The testing of hypotheses using the experimental methods favoured by natural scientists is largely ruled out for the study of policy processes, as researchers cannot control the variables and political processes themselves, making experimentation inappropriate. Hence, as Durkheim argued in his classic book on comparison in the social sciences (1982, p. 141):
We have only one way of demonstrating that one phenomenon is the cause of another. That is to compare the cases where they are both simultaneously present or absent, so as to discover whether the variations they display in these different combinations of circumstances provide evidence that one depends on the other.
Of course, taking the lead suggested by Durkheim depends on what one wants to explain, but if, as intended in this book, the objective is not to explore and test the efficacy of specific policies but rather to provide an informed account of policy variation and the explanations for its occurrence, then it needs to be accepted, as Higgins (1981, p. 223) suggests, that ‘Comparison, as a technique or method, is so crucially a part of any form of evaluation that one might wish to argue that comparative social policy is the parent discipline and any methodology not employing comparisons is of a lower order.’
The origins of comparative studies
Comparative approaches to the examination of social policy emerged from challenges to theories that saw its development as part of a modernization process in which economic, urban and demographic change were seen as explanatory variables producing policy convergence across the world. These challenges replaced this approach with typologies, recognizing the varied nature of social policy growth. ‘Regime theory’ has tended to dominate this work, first seeing political and economic variables as important for the varied features of social policy, and then becoming supplemented by examination of wider cultural and social factors and even by notions of the importance of ideas, factors which take comparative analysis far beyond a more crude assessment of public spending.
A simple comparison of social policy expenditure by different nations shows, not surprisingly, that high levels of such expenditure only occur in the richer nations of the world. The OECD average for social spending is around 20 per cent (OECD, 2019), but similar data are of limited reliability outside the OECD group of nations. Put simply, there is a relationship between high levels of GDP per head and high social expenditure, but this is a very imprecise relationship. This is particularly evident at the lower end of the spending ranking, where very prosperous nations such as the US, Australia, the Netherlands and Switzerland are relatively low spenders (OECD, 2019). Furthermore, as suggested in Chapter 2, it should not be taken for granted that high state social expenditure is necessarily a good indicator of effective use of that spending to reduce inequality.
Hence, the starting point for comparative analysis was a quest to explain the combination of evidence of a loose association between national prosperity and social policy expenditure with the other factors which might explain variation in that association. The evolving relationship between economic market systems and the state was an important driving force (Wilensky and Lebaux, 1965). Industrialization was seen as the generator of distributional changes in society and a source of demands for new ways of dealing with consequential disadvantages (Rimlinger, 1971). To then explain the expanding role of the state, arguments from welfare economics were applied. Firms recognized that meeting the health, educational and other welfare needs of their workforce imposed costs, which could make them uncompetitive by comparison with firms which did less. Hence, there was an increased tendency to look to the state as a means of enforcing the ‘socialization’ of those costs, sharing them more widely through society while lessening demands on private businesses.
The Marxian version of that argument was most forcefully presented by O’Connor (1973) and Gough (1979). This saw industrial capital as facing two kinds of problems. One of these, already set out in Chapter 2, is that the efficient operation of capitalism required attention to be given to the maintenance of a fit and trained labour supply. It was in the interests of individual capitalists that the cost of doing this should be ‘collectivized’, that is, taken on by society as a whole. This function was most readily performed by the only overarching body – the state. The other problem facing capital was unrest in a society in which employment was insecure, rewards from employment were low and age and ill health created particular vulnerability to hardship. Marxist theory proposes that capitalism needs a ‘reserve army of labour’ as a means to keep wages low, and that workers are regarded by capitalists as ‘factors’ of production to be employed as cheaply as possible, and with no regard to their nuclear or extended family responsibilities. These are inherent characteristics of capitalism which, for Marx, will contribute to its ultimate downfall. However, if the state can deal with some of these problems, without at the same time undermining the basic economic relationship between capital and labour, then the otherwise gradually accumulating discontent about the system can be reduced.
Both the non-Marxist theory and the Marxist theory are largely functionalist in character given their assumption that these developments are the necessary consequences of industrialization, and have thus been criticized as deterministic, paying little attention to the choices made by actors or to variations in response from place to place (Ashford, 1986). Nevertheless, these theories contributed to generalizations about welfare development, taking the discussion away from naïve emphases upon ‘progress’ or the growth of compassion. Industrialization was of course recognized as making an important contribution to increases in the standard of living, and with higher levels of personal income comes the possibility for the state to raise high levels of taxes to pay for social policies. Some exponents of the modernization thesis went on to consider the demographic effects of industrialization, urbanization and high levels of income, specifically lowered birth rates and raised life expectancy (for example Wilensky, 1975).
These emphases upon modernization were challenged by others who either sought to examine the quantitative evidence more carefully, recognizing the absence of a simple correlation between, for example, social expenditure and national prosperity (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981; Pampel and Williamson, 1989), or sought to add qualitative considerations (Higgins, 1981; Ashford, 1986; Flora, 1986). These studies, and particularly the latter group, recognized that even if there were broad general influences to which countries were responding, there was a diversity of ways of doing this. This diversity might arise because of the varying strength of the influences on social policy development from country to country. Hence, attention shifted very much to the varieties of welfare arrangements, stimulated by the increased recognition of the complex influences upon policy change and also perhaps by the evidence that the convergence predicted by some of the earlier theorists was not occurring. It was from this that the approach that now dominates comparative social policy studies – regime theory – arose.
Esping-Andersen’s regime model
The origins of Esping-Andersen’s argument about how distinct types of welfare systems may be distinguished lie in work by Titmuss (1974; reproduced in Alcock et al., 2001), which suggests that three models
