Revisiting Conceptualization and Operationalization in Welfare State Research: The Case of Quantified Qualitative Social Rights Data

Comparative welfare state research has been a big success story in having accumulated a remarkable body of knowledge. Despite these achievements, it is still not clear, whether we arrived at common, indisputable conceptualizations and operationalizations as the ‘dependent variable problem debate’ attests. This paper contributes to this debate by revisiting the conceptual and operational pillars of state-of-the-art studies using quantified qualitative social rights data. These studies are based on two leading welfare state indicator databases – Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED). In recent decades, studies conceptualizing the welfare state in terms of social rights rested on these forceful measurement tools. Presuming that they measure the same thing, most researchers simply used whichever database was easier available for them. The founders of SCIP and CWED, however, have recently cautioned that the datasets ‘differ in their underlying framework’ for analyzing the common key indicator – replacement rates. This paper, first, traces conceptualization methods in welfare state research since the 1960s. Second, it discusses the rise to prominence of social rights databases – CWED and SCIP – relying on different operationalizations based on shared concepts. Third, it explores the extent to which these databases have similar operational definitions for a set of common indicators, such as program coverage and benefit eligibility rules. It concludes there remain significant, but hitherto largely overlooked, differences in terms of conceptualizing and operationalizing these indicators, which, we believe, should be taken into consideration in future research building on SCIP and CWED.