Thursday, April 14, 2016
Aria A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Lying at the intersection between rich and poor countries Turkey features typical characteristics of both 'social policy practices' of the ‘global periphery’ and ‘classic welfare states’ of the OECD world. Analyzing this 'liminal' regime could thus offer insights for comparative welfare state research, increasingly broadly defined. The Turkish welfare state has hitherto been largely overlooked by this growing literature, however. Despite being an OECD founding member, data availability problems as well case selection criteria that called for focusing on ‘most similar’ cases (Korpi 1989) precluded Turkey’s inclusion in classic works classifying welfare states into different welfare regimes. This paper presents preliminary findings of a research project that aims to fill this gap in the literature. In order to do so, first, it presents qualitative and quantitative data (including Social Citizenship Indicator Programme (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED) indicators, as well as detailed OECD social expenditure data) for an exhaustive mapping exercise. Second, the paper combines different research methods (descriptive statistics, cluster analysis and principal component analysis backed up by comparative historical research tools) to evaluate whether, and if so, the extent to which Turkey can be situated neatly into any of the ‘worlds of welfare’ as they appear in ‘classic’ and ‘unconventional’ contexts. Finally, by employing these state-of-the-art measurement tools of comparative welfare state research to the 'liminal' case of Turkey, the paper also tests the universal applicability of our conceptual and operational definitions and measurement techniques that have originally been developed to understand classic welfare states.
