rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 4). These ideas have had particular resonance since the late 2010s when both established and emerging state commitments to welfare have never been more fragile.
Since much of the contemporary controversy about welfare policies concerns the applicability of strongly market-oriented approaches, there may be a case for a simpler regime categorization system. It is often easier to draw a line between the liberal systems and the rest, than between the social democratic and the conservative regimes. The advocates of the social democratic approach are in many respects marginalized in the post-2008 world, and although the dissemination of models of social policy is occurring, the battle lines are in effect between the liberal and the conservative approaches.
This alternative way of considering social policy systems has much in common with Hall and Soskice’s (2001) classification of varieties of capitalism. They distinguish between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, where they argue (2001, p. 8) that in the former,
firms coordinate their activities primarily via hierarchies and competitive market arrangements. … Market relationships are characterized by the arm’s-length exchange of goods or services in a context of competition and formal contracting. In response to the price signals generated by such markets, the actors adjust their willingness to supply and demand goods or services, often on the basis of the marginal calculations stressed by neoclassical economics.
In the ‘coordinated market economies’, by contrast,
firms depend more heavily on non-market relationships to coordinate their endeavours with other actors and to construct their core competencies. These non-market modes of coordination generally entail more extensive relational or incomplete contracting, network monitoring based on the exchange of private information inside networks, and more reliance on collaborative, as opposed to competitive, relationships to build the competencies of the firm … economies are more often the result of strategic interaction among firms and other actors.
In these latter countries, the state is crucially a more active partner, linking with a range of interest groups (in the way described in Esping-Andersen’s categorization of the conservative regime).
In an analysis which examines both theoretically and empirically the varieties of capitalism and the typologies of the welfare regime approach, Schröder (2009) concludes that countries nest within a scheme of difference that becomes more complex as more factors are included in comparison. Thus, rather than competing to provide a single explanation of difference between countries, the range of typologies established by different authors offers a more ‘fine-grained’ picture of variation among states that diverge on the key axis of difference – the liberal economic model or its absence (see Schmidt, 2009, for example, who writes of ‘state influenced market economies’). As in the elaborations of specifications of Esping-Andersen’s conservative regime, the ‘non-liberal’ countries in the Mediterranean and Asian regions are regularly found to be different from continental Europe. An analysis by Lallement (2011) sees this difference as important for understanding the responses to the 2008 economic crisis, where being ‘liberal’ has been shown to have significant purchase on both the form and extent of policy reform. In a similar vein, Hay and Wincott’s (2012) post-crisis assessment of European countries also finds that beyond the liberal/non-liberal division, what emerges are clusters of similar countries rather than ‘worlds’ with hard boundaries. More importantly for social policy, however, is their argument that whether countries compete in the global market on the basis of ‘cost’ (cheap labour, cheap exports and so on) or ‘quality’ (high-level skills, high-end manufacturing) determines their welfare commitment.
What Hay and Wincott’s (2012) work reveals for advanced European economies (which also has resonance for the rest of the world) is that although convergence towards a liberal economic model is neither evident nor certain, within the operation of global capitalism the space for national idiosyncrasies of welfare arrangement is perceived by governments to be far more limited than it was in the period following the Second World War.
Some of the limitations of the welfare regime approach in dealing with social policy developments not located in advanced economies have already been explored. But it is also a feature of contemporary social policy making, particularly relevant for countries with economies that are developing and/or emerging, that key areas of regulation traditionally associated with the emergence of social provisions such as trade and labour are increasingly bound by agreements and legal frameworks that operate at the global, or at least international level. This is most obvious and well documented in relation to the European Union, but other IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, ILO and World Trade Organization play an increasingly important role in shaping the parameters of social policy, particularly in countries where the political-administrative architecture is less established or unstable. Chapter 4 recognizes these issues as a challenge that needs to be resolved in building on regime-related explanations of the development of welfare arrangements.
This chapter started by noting diversity as summarized by comparative expenditure statistics, and went on to show that early efforts at comparative generalization gave rather more attention to common trends than to diversity. The theoretical work that really marks the shift away from that approach is Esping-Andersen’s stress upon the idea of different regimes, which has been examined in the context of the ideas of some of his main critics. Esping-Andersen’s original development of regime theory continues to represent the dominant approach to social policy comparison. To dissent from the view that there are in various senses ‘families’ of social policy systems can only imply a wish to either stress the uniqueness of systems or to confine study to limited comparisons of specific aspects of social policy. Nevertheless, the application of regime theory remains much weaker where countries lie outside the standard frameworks of comparison, but where social policy is practised, highlighting the need to think beyond the ‘worlds of welfare’ and better account for worlds of social policy. Identification of this issue also links with another problem about the extent to which the central tenets of regime theory rest upon analysis of income security policies (or, more recently, employment policy). This is given attention in subsequent chapters on specific policy domains and is followed up in detail particularly in the chapter on health policy. It does seem anomalous that despite the enormous importance of health care within social policy the work specifying regimes gives it minimal attention. This is true, above all, in Esping-Andersen’s own work (where health care does not even appear in the index of his original three worlds work). It can only be said that, such has been the influence of the regime approach, it has fed into questions about the use of typologization in all the policy fields explored in this book.
On the other hand, it is still appropriate to challenge with the question: why typologize? If the academic study of social policy necessarily has an inherent social purpose then typologizing for its own sake with no wider significance would have little point. It is important therefore not to lose sight of Esping-Andersen’s argument that regime theory is designed to highlight the dynamics of social policy systems past, present and future. This provides a clear rationale not to depart too radically from a judiciously theorized model, or to ensure that if departure is deemed necessary there are good reasons based on the identification of an alternative dynamic, rather than simple observations that some systems are different. The arguments setting out the limits of Esping-Andersen’s model are important in themselves for comparative analysis inasmuch as they highlight different processes in the ever-changing world of social policy. In this respect a fallible but well-theorized taxonomy is useful precisely because it highlights the complex nature of differences between societies. But to what extent does it, in the end, help to explain policy choices? This topic forms the starting point for Chapter 4
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