There is a growing consensus in contemporary comparative welfare state research that datasets aiming at capturing the institutional features of social insurance programs represent the state-of-the-art conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of welfare stateness. Based on the Marshallian concept of social citizenship these datasets helped us make sense of welfare state developments across time as well as compare ‘welfare stateness’ across the usual eighteen or so countries that were widely taken to be ‘established’ welfare states. Premising on Esping-Andersen’s oft-repeated statement that ‘no-one struggles for spending per se’, this turn towards measuring the institutional characteristics of welfare states was widely welcomed as it helped uncover variation across the varieties within ‘established’ welfare states as well changes within them through time. As welfare state research recently expanded to cover areas beyond the world of established welfare states, this panel aims to discuss the validity and reliability of these state-of-the-art research tools developed to analyze the ‘established’ varieties: Do these measurement tools that help us make sense of established welfare states also help us understand ‘emerging’ welfare states? Do we need any additional indicators for a variety of these new cases, and if so, why? The panel discusses these and other related questions which are increasingly pressing especially after the recent inclusion of fifteen new cases to the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED).