Globalizing Comparative Social Policy: Going Past Europe

Welfare state research has focused, theoretically and empirically, on a small set of advanced industrial democracies. Its theoretical pretensions, however, have generally been much broader than its empirical and conceptual focus. Industrialization and democratic consolidation of countries around the world offer many reasons to expand the enterprise of comparative social policy. There are many directions to go, but one approach is to export conceptual frameworks from existing Western research to see a) if they are translatable, and b) whether they suggest any continuity of results. Does anything we know about the causes and consequences of social protection travel when the cases considered expand “out of sample?” Has existing research been impeded by its narrow case selection, or are the contexts across regions simply too great to permit useful comparisons, leaving us with a basically “area studies” approach to welfare policies. If so, what are the areas? Does admission into the EU suffice to legitimately treat former Communist welfare states as comparable to the old EU welfare states and legitimately continue to ignore South Korea and Taiwan? By what criteria can we decide that welfare states are comparable or not? This paper grapples with these issues in two ways. First, it will address the issue of expanding the CWED welfare generosity and social rights framework “east and south” and its meaning. Second, it will consider the “case comparability” issue by looking backwards at the actual range of contexts contained in cross-sectional and historical welfare state studies within the core welfare states.