Numerous analysts have suggested that globalization and the emergence of more knowledge-based economies have encouraged high-income nations to shift towards a model of productive welfare focused on social investment, yet typologies of welfare are still largely drawn on the basis of measures of social protection rather than social investment. Here we develop a classification of welfare state types that incorporates both productive and protective elements of social policy. Using fuzzy set ideal type analysis we explore data for a sample of 23 OECD countries in three time points: 1994, 1998 and 2003. Our findings provide no more than very modest support for claims that welfare states are shifting from protective to productive modes of provision and, in many cases, we identify a shift in the alternative direction. In addition, we identify some nations that are clearly productive in their focus and others that manage to combine productive and protective features
The introduction of innovative macro-measures has been one of the preferred means to account for identified limitations of traditional quantitative approaches in comparative analyses of the welfare state. However, these state-of-the-art indicators are not powerful enough to account for the nuanced politics of ‘welfare state change’ across mature welfare states as they produce inconsistent - and in several cases contrary - findings on the country level, which also appear to be at odds with the established notion of ‘regime dependence’ in the historical, case-study literature. Touching upon the limitations of the relevant indicators, we argue that they can at best be seen as crude approximations; this is the root cause for the above asymmetries. The ‘dependent variable problem’ within the comparative analysis of the welfare state is a problem of data and operational definitions as much as it is a problem of theoretical conceptualization. While the combination of nuanced quantitative and historical findings has become the norm in the broader literature, the article stresses the potential of disaggregated analyses of individual social policy domains within nations and its combination with detailed case-study analyses of social policy making.
Several theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around 'productive welfare'. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kühner 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the welfare states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have a distinct bias towards the 'productive' rather than 'protective' dimensions of welfare. In this article, we build on our earlier work, utilizing fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) to explore the balance between 'productive' and 'protective' dimensions of welfare state activity. Here we extend our analysis beyond the OECD, incorporating a range of nations on the 'fringe' of the OECD from Latin America, East Asia and the non-OECD parts of Europe. In so doing, we contest simple notions of welfare regimes aligning with regional blocks. Primarily, however, we highlight the advantages of the 'diversity-orientated' approach to data analysis that fuzzy set methods facilitate in comparison with standard quantitative techniques. In particular, we utilize FSITA to avoid data availability and reliability issues that have plagued quantitatively informed classifications of global welfare regimes. Not least, we argue FSITA allows for the contextualization of cases in a way that is sealed to quantitatively driven, comparative research. Thus, we argue FSITA has an important role to play in attempts to extend the inclusiveness of the 'welfare modelling business' in a manner that reflects diverse and highly significant cases beyond the Western lens that dominates the literature.
This article draws on recent data provided by the Asian Development Bank's Social Protection Index and uses Fuzzy Set Ideal Type Analysis to develop ideal types of welfare activity to which 29 countries in Asia and the Pacific can have varying degrees of membership. There is little evidence that the commitment to “productive” and “protective” welfare is oriented along broad geographical units or predetermined by economic affluence and the size of the informal economy. It also adds an explorative Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to test the effect of “productive” and “protective” welfare properties on human development and income equality. Here, it finds that the absence of strong income protection is most clearly linked to low human development at the macro-level; high education investment is linked to high income inequality if governments fail to invest in employment and income protection or employment protection and training, respectively.
The question of how best to account for the multidimensional character of welfare states has become an integral part of discussions on the so-called dependent variable problem within comparative welfare state research. In this paper, we discuss challenges from an attempt to capture productive and protective welfare state dimensions by means of several methodological techniques, namely Z-score standardisation, cluster analysis, factor analysis and fuzzy-set ideal type analysis. While we illustrate that a decision to use any one of these techniques has a substantial bearing on the produced findings, we specifically argue that fuzzy-set ideal type analysis offers considerable advantages over more traditional, statistically rooted approaches. This is particularly true if the observed dimensions are conceptually distinct and 'antithetical' .
This article discusses whether Mainland China under the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao leadership has developed a new welfare settlement, the emphasis of which is to shift away from a 'productivist' focus on education and healthcare investment towards a more 'protective' approach, characterized by investing into social protection and establishing a minimum living guarantee for both the urban and rural poor. In so doing, this article reviews the conceptual debate on Chinese social policy development and explores whether there is any evidence to substantiate a gradual decrease of fragmentation in social provision among the Chinese provinces. With regard to the former question, the article finds that the various social policy initiatives have yet to amount to a qualitative shift in the core foundation of the human capital-focused welfare production logic in China. With regard to the latter question, we argue that considerable fragmentation of social provision at the Chinese provincial level continues to hamper attempts to define a coherent Chinese social model. Indeed, we find considerable diversity in terms of the co-operative state-local interactions within China leading to varying trajectories of social decentralization. Unlike much of the current research in comparative social policy analysis, which continues to treat Mainland China as a single case, this article provides a strong account of a productivist construction of selective welfare pragmatism, which reproduces social policy gaps for different groups of the Chinese population, and suggests that determining multiple 'welfare types' within China might be the most fruitful path for future academic inquiry.
Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the ‘limits of productivist regimes’ (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare. This article develops three distinct types of East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical, employing set-theoretic methods. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, including education, health care, family policy, old-age pensions, public housing, and passive labour market policy, in six East Asian societies: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. We find that all cases except Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced at least one radical shift in their welfare models over the past three decades (1990–2016). East Asian governments have increasingly combined quantitative expansion or retrenchment of ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policy structures but have done so in unique ways. South Korea has followed the most ‘balanced’ approach to welfare development and stands out as the best candidate for further type-specific expansions moving forward.
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