Unemployment Protection and Family Policy at the Turn of the 21st Century: A Dynamic Approach to Welfare Regime Theory

Abstract

International audienceThis article contributes to the welfare state regime literature from a substantive and methodological perspective. At a very abstract level we confirm the relevance of the welfare state regime theory and stability for the period from 1971 to the end of the 1990s. However, by analyzing family policy and unemployment protection, we observe a dual transformation of the welfare state, consisting of a trend towards a 'socialization' of family policies and a retrenchment in unemployment insurance benefits. Our Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of the two policy domains captures the multidimensionality of the decommodification and defamilialization concepts and visualizes welfare state developments over time in a Cartesian space. This dynamic analysis provides us with a nuanced understanding of welfare state regime stability and change

(De)familialization and (De)genderization – Competing or Complementary Perspectives in Comparative Policy Analysis?

“…In the article, I try to avoid the type of discussion that Vail (2010) criticizes as 'focused obsessively on classificatory minutia' (Vail 2010: 313) and follow the call of several researchers to pursue more theoretical research underlying the conceptual issues of welfare regime typologies (see Powell and Barrientos 2011;Rice 2013;Ferragina et al 2013). Thus, the broader mission of this article is, first, to set the foundations for a refinement of different policy regime typologies within the framework of the CA; and, second, to establish a consistent basis for the specification of future ideal types (operationalization) and empirical work on country classifications.…”

Institutionalizing segregation: Conditional cash transfers and employment choices

“…The paper operationalizes a methodological alternative, explicitly considering such data complexity. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is used for the visualization of survey data, allowing for a multivariate exploration of the data and simplifying complex structures (Ferragina et al 2012). The approach is not probabilistic‚ therefore is not aimed at predicting any value.…”

On the ‘How Many Europes’ Debate: Varieties of Service Economies

“…This methodological approach has been extensively used within the ‘welfare regime literature’ in order ‘to test the regime classification of countries’ (Ferragina et al . , p. 786). According to Powell and Barrientos (, p. 91) ‘cluster analysis has proved the most effective and widely used technique to identify welfare regimes’.…”