Welfare Regime Analysis

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.