A Framework for the Comparative Study of Social Services

Measuring welfare state generosity in developing and transitional welfare states is often challenged not only by lack of comparative quantitative data, but also by issues of conceptual stretching. This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of one of the key measures of welfare entitlement generosity developed in the comparative welfare state research in the context of post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). With the new time series data provided by the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset CWED2, comparative approaches including the CEE countries have become feasible. This paper first discusses quantitative measures of welfare entitlement generosity in the tradition of the social rights of citizenship approach and how they can be applied for cross-country comparisons. It then demonstrates empirically how the emerging CEE welfare states’ generosity compares to mature “old” OECD welfare states. Finally, the paper shows the potential and the pitfalls of quantitative measures of welfare state generosity by discussing, to what extent do indicators of social security scheme generosity measure the same in established and emerging welfare states, which functional equivalents may be relevant in the context of emerging welfare states and how far can we stretch our theoretical concepts.

The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the conceptualization of comparative pedagogies within Continental European and Anglophone traditions, and to discuss the importance of comparative pedagogy within the contemporary comparative educational research as such. The chapter opens with the issue of naming and translation of the key terminology, notably pedagogy, comparative pedagogy, and vzgoja (Erziehung in German and vospitanie in Russian) – a concept which implies the teacher’s intentional guidance of children in their moral, personal, social, aesthetical, physical, and spiritual advancement. The chapter presents a brief history of the development of pedagogy as a distinctive science, and proceeds with the discussion on pedagogy’s identity. Due to multifaceted understanding of pedagogy in Continental Europe, the chapter focuses on the academic tradition in Slovenia and wider area of former Yugoslavia. Further, the role of comparison in different contemporary historical periods of pedagogy’s development is explained. The chapter shows that comparative pedagogy has different meanings in different academic traditions. The main difference between that Continental Europe and the Anglophone world is in the knowledge base they built on (pedagogy vs. other social sciences), and the focus they place on endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the nature of education systems and pedagogical processes. The author finally proposes a new definition of comparative pedagogy; a definition which takes pedagogy as its knowledge base, but is also informed with a long tradition of comparative education research based on other social sciences.

Data for the United States and countries in Western Europe indicate a negative correlation between the dependency ratio and both labor tax rates and the generosity of social transfers, after controlling for other factors that influence the size of the welfare state. This is despite the increased political clout of the dependent population implied by the aging of the population. This paper develops a model of intra-and inter-generational transfers and human capital formation which addresses this seeming puzzle. We show that with democratic voting, a higher dependency ratio can lead to lower taxes or less generous social transfers.

In 2010, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) celebrated its fortieth anniversary as the leading association for political science in Europe. Forty-one years earlier, in 1969, three European political scientists sent a letter to about a dozen of their European colleagues outlining some suggestions for creating an informal network of institutions and centers interested in comparative politics research. The authors of the letter were Serge Hurtig, Jean Blondel, and Stein Rokkan. Over the next year, led by Blondel and Rokkan with the support of a number of leading professors at the forefront of comparative research in their respective countries (the “founders” being Serge Hurtig, Norman Chester, Hans Daalder, Richard Rose, Jorgen Westerstahl, and Rudolf Wildenmann) and the backing of the Ford Foundation, the ECPR began to take shape. The original plan called for a European journal, a summer school, inventories of European political scientists and graduate courses, workshops, a data information center, and the construction of a transnational infrastructure of institutions to foster a self-sustaining community of professional political scientists. On July 29, 1970, a Ford Foundation grant was awarded to support the achievement of these aims, and the ECPR was established.

This article seeks to measure and explain interprovincial differences in inequality and poverty reduction since the 1980s for non-elderly Canadian families. These variations are compared with dissimilarities among the advanced capitalist welfare states, where they are large. Interprovincial discrepancies are shown to be ample by this international standard. The article also finds that power resources theory, which draws attention to the role of union strength and partisan incumbency in explaining welfare state variations, accounts for an important part of these interprovincial differences. These findings suggest that sub-national jurisdictions can be more consequential for welfare state outcomes than comparative research has acknowledged, and that power resources accounts deserve more attention in Canadian social policy scholarship.

The Swiss welfare state has an odd position in comparative welfare state research. Little is known about it, in particular about its historical development as the few high quality and internationally available studies have tended to focus on reforms in recent decades. In addition, the Swiss welfare state is often misunderstood. Its peculiar public-private mix, the role of non-state actors and its fragmentation bedevil international comparisons. No wonder scholars struggle to agree whether the Swiss welfare state is to be classified as conservative, liberal or social democratic in Esping-Andersen's famous welfare state typology. Some countries simply defy easy classifications. In parallel, but largely unnoticed by the academic community, the Swiss welfare state has become a blueprint for reform in recent years, in particular with regard to old-age pensions. The three-pillar doctrine, developed in Switzerland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, influences pension reforms across the globe today and is advocated by powerful international organisations such as the World Bank and the OECD. Matthieu Leimgruber's wonderful book provides many answers for this simultaneity of obscurity and popularity. It traces the historical development of public and private provision of old-age pensions in Switzerland from its origins in the late 19th century until its (final) maturation in the late 20th century. The book is organized in four chapters that document the development of old-age pensions chronologically and that are complemented by an introduction, an epilogue and a conclusion. The introduction presents the Swiss welfare state with its puzzling features such as its peculiar public-private mix and the belated development. Leimgruber, an economic historian, has an impressive knowledge of social science accounts of welfare state development, as the large number of works discussed in the introduction, including the influential contributions by Jacob Hacker, Christopher Howard, Isabela Mares and Peter Swenson, proves. Although Leimgruber does not develop an explicit theoretical argument, he uses these theoretical lenses to structure and inform his narrative of the politics of Swiss old-age pensions. The first chapter, “The dress rehearsal for pension politics (1890–1914)”, reports the history of the 1911 federal law on sickness and accident insurance (KUVG). This chapter, although not about old-age pensions, is important to understand the development of the three-pillar doctrine as it foreshadows the politics that were to give the Swiss old-age pension system its peculiar shape; hence, the chapter's title “dress rehearsal” (Leimgruber, by the way, is a wizard with titles). It shows how the Swiss institutional setting, the combination of federalism and referendum politics, gave the business community in general and the insurance industry in particular the means to prevent ground-breaking legislation in the fields of accident and health insurance. The resulting KUVG paled in comparison with legislation in neighbouring countries. Leimgruber turns to old-age pensions in the second chapter, entitled “Laying the foundations of a divided pension system (1914–1938)”. Here he documents the unequal development of public and occupational provision of old-age pensions. Occupational pensions rapidly developed outside public scrutiny and were spurred by tax exemptions. In parallel, the political project of public pensions endured a conflict-ridden and protracted policy-making process. Fought by business in general and the increasingly powerful insurance industry in particular and lacking support from the labour movement (that was strongly influenced by mutualism), the so-called Lex Schulthess was finally defeated in a referendum by a large majority in 1931. Nevertheless, this period laid the foundation for the divided welfare state as occupational pensions became too large to be easily replaced by a public scheme, while among insurers the idea gained ground that abandoning basic benefits to public schemes would enable private providers to focus on supplementary pensions. The failure of the Lex Schulthess was a clear signal that policy-makers had to respect the existing occupational pension schemes. Hence, when public support for a public old-age pension scheme reached a new peak during World War 2, the government drafted a new act, which, however, was not supposed to be a “monster like the Beveridge Plan” (a quote by federal councillor Walther Stampfli and the title of the third Chapter). Rather, the law was drafted in collaboration with the most powerful employers' associations and envisioned a divided system that left only the provision of basic benefits to the public scheme. Nevertheless, the proposal, the Alters- und Hinterlassenenversicherung (AHV), was challenged by a referendum in 1947. According to Leimgruber, it was the skilful leadership of Stampfli (a manager at the manufacturing company Von Roll before his election to the government) that kept the employers' associations in line and secured the government proposal's victory in the referendum campaign. The creation of the AHV in 1947, however, did not establish the today world-famous three-pillar model. Rather, the development of the three-pillar doctrine was the political response to a challenge by the far left. Demanding the expansion of public social insurance, the far-left Labour Party sponsored an initiative that requested the creation of a generous people's pension. The political establishment, including the Social Democratic Party and its responsible federal councillor Hans Peter Tschudi, countered this proposal by a plan that aimed to anchor in the federal constitution the three-pillar doctrine. The story of this political conflict is told in the fourth chapter, entitled “The three-pillar doctrine and the containment of social insurance (1948–1972)”. Again crucially influenced by the insurance industry and in particular Peter Binswanger, a director at the insurance company Winterthur Life, the federal government drafted a counterproposal to the people's pension that satisfied most business interests by containing public social insurance and leaving ample room for occupational pensions to grow. Given its broad political support, the government's counterproposal had no trouble defeating the Labour Party's people's pensions. In the epilogue, Leimgruber briefly summarizes the development of the three-pillar model to the present. He also engages in contemporary debates on the financial sustainability of the Swiss welfare state and points to the enduring power of business interests in shaping politics and discourse. This section, however, might be the least helpful as it is rather short and tends to simplify some of the complexities of contemporary debates. While it is certainly true that dramatic inequalities persist, Leimgruber is too quick to characterize warnings of public social insurance's downfall as “fear-mongering” (p. 277). In this chapter, he does not always do justice to the arguments of neoliberal critics of welfare state expansion. Leimgruber's book is an important and very welcome contribution to the scholarship on the Swiss welfare state. Overall, there is little to criticize. In addition, much criticism might be unfair given that he is a historian. It is a pity that Leimgruber does not discuss the diffusion of the three-pillar doctrine to other countries and international organisations, although he analyses this process in a separate publication (see Leimgruber 2012). The book could be made (even) more reader-friendly by providing a concise summary of the argument at the beginning. Maybe most importantly, the book could have benefitted from a more explicit discussion of the theoretical arguments. Clearly, Leimgruber's work is inspired by the power resources approach, but he also relies on historical institutionalism and ideational approaches. He emphasizes the crucial roles of individual actors (e.g. Binswanger, Stampfli, Tschudi) as well as of epistemic communities. His work is stimulated by insights from the varieties of capitalism literature, but also highlights Swiss particularities. Leimgruber discusses some of these arguments, but he never ties them together to provide a parsimonious theoretical argument. I guess it was never his goal to provide such a ‘neat’ theoretical argument. Hence, it is probably unfair to criticize him for its absence. Nevertheless, some more theoretical guidance might have helped the reader to follow his interesting and insightful analysis. These few critical comments, however, should not stop anybody from reading this book. Leimgruber has managed to unearth a lot of new empirical evidence and to shed light on the complicated, but fascinating historical development of the Swiss welfare state. This great book is an essential read for anybody interested in Swiss politics or welfare state development.

In this paper, we attempt to incorporate an innovative and more comprehensive view of defamilization into the comparative analysis of real-type welfare state models. The study presents four empirically distinguished welfare state regimes where we consider separately both notions associated with (de)familization and (de)genderization together with other dimensions characterizing different welfare state models. In a multivariate statistical analysis framework, we examine 25 European countries using data covering the period between 2014 and 2017. Our findings suggest that whereas Southern European countries represent various welfare state models, most of the analyzed Central and Eastern European countries form a separate group. Similarly, the Nordic countries, except Iceland, belong to the same cluster. However, CEE countries and Nordic countries represent extremely divergent models in terms of the degree of degenderization, but similar in terms of family policy, the public–private mix, as well as welfare state generosity. The data also show that the extensive welfare state coexists with the state’s predominance in delivering welfare provisions. Moreover, we demonstrate that neither the general size of the welfare state or its public–private mix nor a pro-family policy differentiate the socio-economic situation of women across countries studied.

A critical appraisal is presented in this paper concerning to comparative legal research in the development of laws within the legal system of a particular country. The emphasis is given on the essential roles of comparative legal research from different aspects of legal branches which co-related to one another. This is closely connected with acceptance of Comparative Law as a legal subject. The analysis is done by viewing the importance of comparative legal research from five (5) main different legal angles of those who involved directly or indirectly with the development of the legal system itself. Such different perspectives are listed as: (i) legal education, (ii) legal scholarship, (iii) legal practice, (iv) practice of the judiciary, and (v) practice of the legislature. Several examples of practices in relation to comparative legal research are taken into account for references, such as from Malaysia, Japan and European countries.

With some notable exceptions, comparative research on the welfare state falls generally into one of two categories: qualitative and generally descriptive case studies and large-scale quantitative efforts at explanation. Case studies have progressed past the point of being essentially journalistic descriptions of the peculiarities of the policy development process or the policies of a particular society. It is nevertheless true that there has been little progress in moving beyond the case study approach towards building a theory about how and why societies make particular decisions about the priorities and organization of their social welfare efforts. On the other hand, while large-scale aggregate analysis yields theoretical statements about the character of ‘the welfare state’, those conclusions are often so general as to be ‘difficult to relate to… how particular substantive problems have been [and might be] handled.’

Self-responsibility is a prominent keyword in social policy and in welfare state reforms. The concept of self-responsibility, though, has never been clearly dissected for welfare state analysis. In particular, the debate on the turn toward self-responsibility in welfare states has not been adequately conceptualized, nor has the institutionalization of the family in welfare states been correspondingly analyzed, though all welfare states, to different degrees, apply family-related conditions to social rights. In other words, welfare states have treated individuals with family differently from individuals without family, and this has an impact on the interpretation of the turn toward self-responsibility. In this contribution, we systematically and comparatively analyze welfare state change in the family-related conditions applied to social rights, in order to identify shifts in financial responsibility for social rights from the public realm to either the individual or the family. We analyze changes occurring between 1993 and 2013 for two social security levels and two target groups in six European countries. Our findings show that trends toward reducing public financial responsibility, as in shifting financial responsibility for social security from the public realm back to citizens, have not prevailed. On the contrary, public financial responsibility for social rights has in part increased and in part been reshifted onto the family, so that self-responsibility is subsumed here under the concept of subsidiarity, and therewith refers to a nonindividualized “self”. Citizens, in other words, are not increasingly conceived by welfare state regulations as isolated and self-reliant individuals, but as subjects embedded in both the public and family spheres.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relations between fiscal soundness and public social expenditure in advanced welfare states so as to reconsider the conventional wisdom that welfare expenditure aggravates national finances. Through this, I propose the clues of building the sustainableKorean welfare state. I focus on the interdependent relationship between fiscal soundness and public social expenditure based on fiscal sociology. Considering this interaction, I form two sets of simultaneous equations models and employ a special statistical method, three‐stage least squares (3SLS). The results regarding the causal relationship between fiscal soundness and public social spending indicate that, if public welfare spending is increased, fiscal health is damaged. However, as many comparative social policy researchers have pointed out, outcomes of welfare states differ from country to country according to the composition of public welfare spending. Specifically, some welfare states with priority given to social services such as vocational training or childcare services have maintained the stability of public finance. By extension, we can say that public social expenditures have a positive influence on fiscal soundness based on the composition of social expenditures. Finally, it is possible to create financially sustainable welfare states.

Self-assessed health among older people in Europe and internet use

As a researcher and consultant I have coordinated local pilots and European research projects to analyse and improve long-term care for older people by better integrating health and social care systems. One of my conclusions from the wide range of initiatives that have been taken over the past two decades in Europe has been the need to treat long-term care as a system in its own right. Long-term care systems require a discernable identity; specific policies, structures, processes and pathways; and the leadership and resources that can underpin expectations, drive performance and achieve better outcomes for people that are living with (and working for those with) long-term care needs. Progress in developing LTC systems can be identified today in all European countries. Integrated care solutions at the interface between health and social care, and between formal and informal care, have appeared. These have been achieved partly by means of (slow) political reforms, partly as a response to market-oriented governance, and in many cases through pioneering community and civil society initiatives. It will depend on such initiatives, and their ability to convince both citizens and policy-makers, whether new societal approaches to long-term care are created that meet the demands of ageing societies.

We study the relationship between job quality and retirement using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, a longitudinal survey covering individuals aged 50+ in several European countries. Although most previous studies looked at the impact of bad working conditions on retirement intentions, we can use the panel dimension to study actual retirement as well as other pathways out of a job. As indicators for job quality we use three different approaches: overall job satisfaction, over‐ and undereducation for a particular job as well as effort–reward imbalance, which measures the imbalance between a worker's effort and the rewards he or she receives in turn. The analysis gives some evidence that poor job quality decreases retirement age, in particular for women.

In this paper, we study how elderly individuals adjust their informal long-term care utilization to changes in the provision of formal care. Despite this is crucial to design effective policies of formal elderly care, empirical evidence is scant due to the lack of credible identification strategies to account for the endogeneity of formal care. We propose a novel instrument, an index that captures individuals' eligibility status for the long-term care programs implemented in the region of residence. Our estimates, which are robust to a number of different specifications, suggest that higher formal care provision would lead to an increase in informal care utilization as well. In the context of current theoretical economic model of care use, this result points to the existence of a substantial unmet demand of care among older people in Europe.