Compare methods

	Welfare Regime Analysis	Comparative Political Economy
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1990	2001
Originator	Gosta Esping-Andersen	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)
Type	Comparative typological framework	Macro-comparative research framework
Seminal source	Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691028576	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Welfare State Regime Typology, Esping-Andersen Welfare Typology, Decommodification Analysis	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy
Related	3	3
Summary	Welfare regime analysis classifies welfare states not by how much they spend but by the qualitative logic of how they distribute welfare, following Gosta Esping-Andersen's 1990 The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Its two organizing concepts are decommodification — the degree to which people can sustain a livelihood independent of the market — and stratification — the patterns of social inequality that welfare arrangements reproduce or alter. On these dimensions Esping-Andersen identified three clustered regime types: the liberal, the conservative-corporatist, and the social-democratic. His 1999 sequel extended the framework to the family and the postindustrial service economy, and a large critical literature has since debated additional types.	Comparative political economy (CPE) is the subfield that asks how political institutions and markets interact to produce different economic outcomes across capitalist democracies, and the macro-comparative research strategy that subfield employs. Rather than treating the economy as a self-contained system, CPE treats production regimes, labor markets, finance, welfare states, and innovation as politically constructed and institutionally embedded, then compares how distinct national configurations — for instance the liberal market economies and coordinated market economies of Hall and Soskice's varieties-of-capitalism framework — generate systematically different patterns of wages, growth, inequality, and adjustment. The approach combines small-N case comparison and large-N cross-national analysis under a shared institutionalist logic.