Welfare regime analysis: 30 years in the making

Introduction

Ever since the truly ground-breaking publication of Esping-Andersen in 1990, scientists who not only specialize in social policy, but also economics, politics, public policy, gender studies, sociology, social work and so forth, have taken up seemingly never-ending discussions about clusters of welfare state systems that resemble each other more or less (i.e. welfare regimes), or just a little bit, or not at all. The long-standing dichotomy that painted a black and white picture of the welfare state in the post-war social policy discourse was broken.

From then on, not black or white, not different shades of gray, but different colors, that is, different types of welfare state systems came to the fore and not only dominated the mainstream theoretical debate in comparative and general welfare state research, but also penetrated different social policy realms like, for example, housing policy, health care policy, gender and family policy and social assistance policy, or particular issues and topics in social policy and beyond.

In the past two and a half decades, an ever-increasing number of researchers from yet more regions of the world (e.g. Eastern Europe, including Russia, Latin America, and East Asia) have taken on the perspectives and methods of welfare regime analysis, or at least refer to their overall findings and significance.

Why we need welfare regime theory

The apparent great need for theoretical and at the same time practical understanding of social policy regimes spans across different sections of the scientific enterprise (system). Over time, social policy professors and researchers have fleshed out the art of welfare regime analysis and come up with different approaches to do seemingly the same thing: to compare welfare state systems and clusters, social policy fields, social welfare ideologies, social welfare politics and its players, or policies and programs themselves, from an international comparative point of view.

There are, however, misunderstandings with regard to methodologies involved. Some scholars explicitly (Aspalter, 2006, 2011, 2017; Aspalter et al., 2009; as well as Esping-Andersen, 1987a, 1987b) or implicitly (Esping-Andersen, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1999; cf. Hicks and Esping-Andersen, 2005) applied the method of ideal types, as developed and amply applied by German sociologist Max Weber a long time ago (cf. Weber, 2014; as well as Eliæson, 2002; Hekman, 1983; Kalberg, 1994) – though at first most experts (professors and researchers) looked at all the details (each and every one of them), and found themselves ever more debating the regime membership of this or that country. Particularly memorable was the debated welfare regime membership of Japan, the Netherlands, and Italy. The author remembers vividly, for example, Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s remarks when the case of the Netherlands came up in the discussion at the 1998 conference at National Chi Nan University in Puli, deep in the mountains of Taiwan.

He simply displayed a relatively non-caring attitude (after years of debating the same kind of issue), having known the truth that one regime membership case is not important for the overall salience of an ideal-typical welfare regime theory, for it to be abandoned or rejected. And yes, regime memberships do change over time, and usually rather slowly, especially from an ideal-typical perspective (one major relative fast-changing case that comes to mind was after the end of the Cold War, when, for example, countries in Eastern Central Europe, as well as Russia and China, abruptly implemented systemic changes from a communist to a capitalist economic and political system in the early 1990s; cf. Chow and Aspalter, 2003; Aspalter et al., 2009; Cerami and Vanhuysse, 2009; Deacon, 1992; Kainu et al., 2017; Leung, 1994).

For any well-versed student of sociology, it may be easy – once one connects this observation with the very nature of sociological (social science) theories – to understand that particular re-occurring observation: challenging theorists criticize a new theory by discussing single cases in point, the theorist who created this new theory stays cool and the ‘attack’ goes into nothing, as the criticism has failed to rattle the new theory and is therefore doomed to failure from the very beginning. This is so because a theory can only be destroyed or abandoned with yet another theory – especially, an ideal-typical theory.

In part, Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime theory was also very explanatory in its historical argumentation (cf. Esping-Andersen 1987a, 1989; but not thoroughly so in the case of the vital influence of Christian Democracy in Germany and Austria; cf. e.g. Aspalter, 2001b), but still at its core it is for the most part a descriptive social policy theory.

In general, there are only three kinds of theories: (a) descriptive, (b) explanatory, and (c) normative/evaluative/prescriptive theories (cf. Midgley, 2002). Descriptive theories are the most basic, and mostly easy theories in general. As it turned out, however, things were not that easy with Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime theory, since Esping-Andersen understated and hardly talked about its ideal-typical nature (cf. also Arts and Gelissen, 2002; Aspalter, 2006; Meier Jaeger, 2006), that is, the fact that this theory is using the method and perspective of Max Weber, where more or less fits are the norm, and this is exactly the winning formula of ideal types – contrary to real types that cannot, do not and do not want to skip any (ever-changing) detail from the picture of comparative analysis:

Each nation exhibits its own unique regime characteristics … Therefore, the social policy of any country is distinctive. . . . this volume will focus on regime types that are easily identified as dramatically different. Regimes are identified in terms of the relation between politics and markets, or perhaps more appropriately between state and economy. The role of social policy within significantly different regime types will be examined through selected cases … The objective of such ‘regime analysis’ is not to provide exhaustive comparisons across either time or societies, but rather to identify ‘ideal-typical’ cases (in the Weberian sense). (Esping-Andersen, 1987b: 7)

The conditions for a thorough social democratization program were clearly more optimal in Norway and Sweden: the labor movements were stronger than elsewhere; the bourgeois parties more divided; the rightist governments from the pre-social democratic era had left behind an unusually meager social policy legacy. No wonder, therefore, that these two nations evolved into ideal-typical social democratic welfare states … (Esping-Andersen, 1987a: 94)

A real-typical descriptive social policy theory may have had utmost difficulties in dealing with unclear or changing welfare regime memberships of especially important and much-debated cases in concern, such as Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, and so on – in real-typical welfare regime analyses that contain usually a much smaller number of cases (e.g. welfare state systems). But in essence, Esping-Andersen, also being a celebrity sociology professor (who is also leading in developing sociology theories), was clear about the robustness of his welfare regime theory. The names of his welfare regime clusters however can be debated – especially with regard to the ideal-typical Christian Democratic Welfare Regime (cf., for example, Aspalter, 2001b, 2006, 2011, 2017), Aspalter et al., 2009; as well as Kersbergen, 1994, 1995; Woldendorp et al., 1998; Huber and Stephens, 1999, 2001; Ebbinghaus and Manow, 2001; Levy, 2006; Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2011).

The data set was replicated (Scruggs and Allan, 2006) to once again validate the numbers behind the theory (including a number of consequential and inconsequential data errors, as well as a very limited empirical support for the decommodification index underlying the study, Scruggs and Allan, 2006), which can still be debated for a long time in the future (even after a quarter of a century that has passed since the almost-all changing publication of Esping-Andersen in 1990).

The one thing nobody ever tried to put to the test, however, was the method of constructing and applying ideal types, as developed by Max Weber himself. This method – and every theory that is built on, modeled after, or rests on, this very method – is very profound, once it is vigorously but cautiously and reasonably argued and applied (especially based on, for example, a large number of case studies and a large number of countries/cases in concern, including in-depth historical and comparative analyses, as well as single case studies), and once it is proven to be useful to the mind of the occasional reader of social policy theory, students of social policy or the hardcore social policy expert alike.

Science methods are being exposed to waves of what is hip (or cool) and what is not. Numbers it seems (even when they are wrong or slimly supportive) have a most powerful sway in current-day social sciences, not just in the Midwest of the United States, but in all of the United States, and still for the most part in Europe, as well as parts of Asia. A method that does not glorify and overstates the importance of all the details – or individual numbers – like the method of ideal types (as set up by a real genius, namely Max Weber) does not seem to be that catchy or appealing for the one or other hardcore current-day journal and some scientific circles that celebrate only numbers.

To be clear, the method of ideal types uses a great deal of details and numbers; it is measuring in great detail the extent of, for example, private health care provision (in terms of hospital beds, social insurance coverage, or money spent, etc.), but in applying, that is comparing the detailed results (numbers), one uses a practical (and the only most practical) way of realizing that numbers are not good enough to catch the whole of the social reality that social policy provides us with and is related to (cf. e.g. Liddle and Lerais, 2016).

Numbers are not good enough to embody and reflect all the traits, inner workings and effects of social policy regimes, social security systems, social policy paradigms, social policies, and their specific social programs, institutions, laws and regulations, its reasons and outcomes. Max Weber realized that early on, and yet a century after, any patient reader of the texts that Weber also specifically wrote for a social policy audience would eventually (probably sooner rather than later) come to understand that his method is superior – when applying it to historical or a large-scale international comparative analyses where it is necessary to grasp the gist of an extreme large ‘cloud’ of information and details (where in addition everything is connected to everything) – to any other method.

Both methods, the ideal-typical and the real-typical method, in welfare regime analysis are complementary and hence both necessary to get a most complete picture of today’s social policy and welfare state outcomes and developments (cf. Aspalter, 2012). The ideal-typical method looks at the larger international and a historical picture. The real-typical method focuses at a lower level of institutional details in social security provision, legislation, and administrative operations of welfare state systems, their policies, programs, and technicalities – usually involving only a couple of countries or systems at a time. Hence, it is vital not to compare findings of one with findings of the other on a one-to-one level:

An ideal type ‘is obtained by means of a one-sided accentuation of one or a number of viewpoints [characteristics] and through the synthesis of a great many diffuse and discrete individual phenomena (more present in one place, fewer in another, and occasionally completely absent), which are in conformity with those one-sided, accentuated viewpoints [characteristics], into an internally consistent mental image’. (Weber, 2014: 125)

… the task of the … [scientist] then becomes that of establishing, in each individual case, how close reality is to, or how distant it is from, that ideal image [ideal type] … (Weber, 2014: 125)

Even though Weber has not come up with social policy regimes, had he been able to read the readings of Richard M. Titmuss (1974) that there are basically three types of social policies (for the influence of Richard Titmuss on Esping-Andersen’s tripartite classification, cf. Mishra, 2002, as well as Esping-Andersen, 1989, 1999), he might have himself come up with an at least tri-partite welfare regime theory, and dared to fully declare the underlying method, work out its details, and show its usefulness to the greatest possible audience, particularly the social policy makers, professionals, and experts of his and our time. Maybe he was just born a century too early, but it is never too late for us to catch up on his path-breaking and extremely useful method in general social sciences. The theoretical and practical salience of the scientific method of setting up and applying ideal types in comparative policy analysis has already been proven to us by history itself – with all the applications from around the world, in all macro-, meso-, and micro-level studies (cf. e.g. later) in comparative and non-comparative social policy analyses over the last two and a half decades – a quarter of a century.

Hence, it is truly high time for reflecting what happened in applied social policy methodology: a long-delayed acceptance, by way of a thousand-fold application of its findings and outcomes, of the method of ideal types in the science of social policy, and that across the entire world.

New studies in social policy research – that have relied on ideal-typical welfare regime theory, or its perspective – have been highly diversified and wide reaching, also in terms of global reach. Just to name a very few topics, they include, for example, gender equality (Hobson, 1994; Lewis, 1992; O’Connor et al., 1999; Sainsbury, 1999), working parents (Leira, 2010), issues of governance (Ban, 2012), health policy and mental health policy (Bambra, 2005, 2006; Brennenstuhl et al., 2012; Hsieh, 2014; Lin, 2016), infant mortality and life expectancy (Chuang et al., 2012; Regidor et al., 2011), family policy (Draibe and Riesco, 2006; Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies [HKIAPS], 2008), education (Beblavy and Thum, 2011), social work education (Lyngstad, 2015; Sicora, 2016), foster care (Berrick and Skivenes, 2013), welfare for older persons (Aysan, 2011; Hamid and Tyng, 2013; Niedzwiedz et al., 2014), labor studies (Heintz and Lund, 2012; Lu, 2015), active labor market policies (Powell and Barrientos, 2004), military expenditure and social equality (Töngür and Elveren, 2012), social security for foreign workers in Malaysia (Saiman and Jemon, 2014), homeless people in Hungary and Slovenia (Filipovic Hrast et al., 2016), children with mental disabilities in Italy (Bonati and Campi, 2005), large families living in poverty in New Zealand (Madden, 2016), the testing of welfare regime membership of new formerly left-out countries and regions (Hui et al., 2012; Cerami, 2010; Minas et al., 2014; Pop-Radu and Ulici-Ciupac, 2016; Raudava, 2013; Toots and Bachmann, 2016), and global social welfare analysis (Draibe and Riesco, 2006; Levitt et al., 2015). Also, governments and international government organizations round the world, such as, for example, the government of China, are increasingly interested in and learning from ideal-typical welfare regime analysis (e.g. An, 2016; Draibe and Riesco, 2006; HKIAPS, 2008; Lin and Liu, 2012).

How to apply welfare regime theory

Usually two methods of how to construct ideal-typical welfare regime models are referred to: the deductive method and the inductive method:

Typologies can be developed inductively by classifying a posteriori social patterns of a set of cases or deductively by defining a priori theoretical dimensions that serve as conceptual lenses or as a ‘yardstick’ for empirical analysis. (Ebbinghaus, 2012: 2)

But actually there is a third method – the abductive method – by producing a theory (or a hypothesis) while doing the empirical testing. That is, in the abductive method larger points of the theory (or common welfare regime characteristics that distinguish in total – i.e. when most characteristics are more or less well matched – one welfare regime from other welfare regimes) are rather clear/slowly getting clearer in an ongoing fashion (over several or more years). To be clear, the abductive method allows for and is built on the premise that the welfare regime theory or common or key identifying welfare regime characteristics is/are being fleshed out until the ideal-typical welfare regime theory stands on firm ground. Note that it took the author about 7 years (from 1998 to 2005) in the case of the Pro-Welfare Oriented Conservative Welfare Regime in East Asia to fully build up all the arguments that firmly substantiate the existence of an ideal-typical welfare regime in (all of) East Asia (cf. Aspalter, 2005).

For sure, Esping-Andersen knew what social policy looked like on the ground in Germany, the United States, Sweden and Hungary, before he had built his theory, but he still needed to integrate relevant empirical knowledge, case by case, again and again, into theory making.

The 1987 chapters of his in the book Stagnation and Renewal in Social Policy (Esping-Andersen, 1987a, 1987b), as well as his 1989 article ‘The Three Political Economies of the Welfare State’ published in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology are proof of that. The development and argumentation for different welfare regimes – as well as the development of the principle of decommodification – was preceding the 1990 book by (at least) 3 years.

But in 1987 he considered Denmark (his own country) not to have formed an ideal-typical welfare regime, in contrast to Sweden and Norway (Esping-Andersen, 1987a: 94). Also, he considered the chance of arguing for a fourth ideal-typical welfare regime, the case of Hungary:

… this volume will focus on regime types that are easily identified as dramatically different. Regimes are defined in terms of the relation between politics and markets, or perhaps more appropriately, between state and economy. The role of social policy within significantly different regime types will be examined through selected cases that exemplify (or approximate) the tradition of classical liberal laissez-faire (the United States), the authoritarian or totalitarian capitalism model (Nazi Germany), the case of advanced social democratic reformist capitalism (Scandinavia), and state socialism (Hungary). (Esping-Andersen, 1987b: 7)

In doing so, Esping-Andersen heavily used the theoretical framework of Karl Polanyi (1957) and applied a very strong neo-Marxist point of view, also quoting frequently Marxist political and theoretical leaders other than Polanyi, for example Fred Block, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Heiman, and Otto Bauer (Esping-Andersen, 1987a). His concluding sentences in his chapter ‘Citizenship and Socialism: Decommodification and Solidarity in the Welfare State’ (Esping-Andersen, 1987b) still upheld the ideals of socialism as the key essence of social policy, and concluded as follows:

In conclusion, it is obvious that the welfare state mandate that was won thirty or fifty years ago is unworkable today. Classical socialist theory predicted well the subsequent necessity of having, somehow, to tamper with the rights of private property. What it did not, and what socialist theory still cannot, properly explain is how a social contract required for such a project may be negotiated. (Esping-Andersen, 1987a: 99)

In 1990, Esping-Andersen still referred to the social democratic welfare regime as the socialist welfare regime, on several occasions, in the book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism – having dropped by that time his previous idea that the communist, de facto socialist model in the eastern half of Europe of the late 1980s represents a fourth type of welfare regime.

From the beginning Esping-Andersen used guiding theories, and he worked out the principles of decommodification and stratification as being vital in determining the distinctiveness of different welfare regimes, as he not only looked at the historical development and political factors behind it (Esping-Andersen, 1987a, 1989), but also looked at current-day data (Esping-Andersen, 1990) to develop, beef up, and sustain his overall, in the end, tripartite and (implicitly) ideal-typical welfare regime theory.

Similarly, Aspalter (2001a, 2002a, 2002b) first looked at the East Asian case also deeply applying an historical and political, especially actor-based, theoretical framework (also trying to especially explain social policy developments there). Only later on (Aspalter, 2006), did Aspalter begin to specifically work with the method and theory of setting up ideal types in welfare regime analysis, by identifying a new ideal-typical welfare regime in East Asia, the ‘pro-welfare conservative welfare regime’, and a few years later, yet another ideal-typical welfare regime in Latin America, what then had been called the ‘anti-welfare conservative welfare regime’ (Aspalter, 2011).

New was then the focus on the principle of functional equivalence (Aspalter, 2006), that explains how different systems designs on the ground can follow the very same social policy strategy and philosophy of governments in the area of social policy making in different countries. Hence the formerly implicitly ideal-typical perspective (Aspalter, 2001a, 2002a, 2002b) gave way to an explicit focus on ideal types that now also especially pay attention to the very helpful principle of functional equivalence in welfare regime analysis. The case of neoliberal (liberal) welfare regime (of Esping-Andersen, 1990) – now, with the application of this very principle – becomes relatively speaking much easier to argue (that is to say, it is still difficult to argue that all Anglo-Saxon countries form one single ideal-typical welfare regime, but at least now it is within the realm of feasibility). As a result, we can now explain different welfare state and welfare system designs and details, even though the same welfare strategy and ‘master plan’ is being applied right across all Anglo-Saxon countries (one that administrates and stigmatizes the poor and locks them up in poverty, rather than lifting them out of poverty once and for all; cf. Midgley and Aspalter, 2016) by referring to the overall principle of functional equivalence in setting up ideal-typical welfare regime models (Aspalter, 2017):

With regard to Anglo-Saxon countries, or the ideal-typical Neoliberal (Liberal) Welfare State Regime, there are also great differences in between each country in concern, among a rather small number of countries (five). The NHS in the UK is a completely different design and strategy of the government, when compared to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the USA (or Obamacare as commonly known). Canada is very different in health care and education from the USA. Australia with the model of mutual obligations and severe, stringent application of asset and means-tested social assistance and services there, and New Zealand with universal pensions, are again very different from a real-typical perspective to the rest of the group … Thus, the only [proper] way to categorize the Neoliberal/Liberal Welfare State Regime is when using the ideal-typical method. (Aspalter, 2017: 24–25)

In general, the principle of functional equivalence in ideal-typical welfare regime theory puts forward the idea that, for example:

[o]ne can use his or her monthly pension to get a mortgage and buy a house, and so one can use the savings of his or her mandatory provident fund accounts to do the same, or apply for and to move into publicly subsidized/constructed public housing units, which is paid by taxation, all of which are deducted from e.g. salaries, and end up providing a roof for oneself and one’s family to live and sleep under (just the route which the money has travelled is different here, it ends up in the same place for the same purpose/function). (Aspalter, 2017: 26)

In 2009, Aspalter, Kim and Park, discussed the regime membership of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia, and argued that these four countries had by then already joined their Western neighbors, in particular Germany and Austria, with whom these countries share their historical roots, that is, political and juridical systems, as well as culture: the ideal-typical Christian democratic welfare regime.

In 2017, Aspalter then carried the idea and method of developing ideal types for welfare state systems in other parts of the world, and subsequently arrived at 10 different ideal types of welfare regimes, including Russia and some other countries of the former Soviet Union, South Asia (e.g. India and Sri Lanka), the rich countries in the Middle East, mostly former Continental European colonies in Africa, and Cuba, the only country left that pursues the formerly and still very important model of the communist/socialist welfare regime (Esping-Andersen has already considered this type a fourth ideal-typical type, as exemplified in the case of Hungary in the late 1980s) (Aspalter, 2017; cf. Esping-Andersen, 1987b).

As of today, a great many countries have not been classified yet, many of which are to be found still in Latin America, Africa, (further east in) Eastern Europe, poorer countries in the Middle East and Asia, as well as numerous island nations in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and elsewhere. Not every country (or welfare state system) that lies, geographically speaking, in the middle of a well-established ideal-typical welfare regime is member of the very same. Macao may serve as an exemplary case in point here (cf. Hui et al., 2012).

The realm of real-typical welfare regime analysis (that lacks any perspective of ideal types) as well is yet to truly unfold its potentials, as many corners and main regions of the world are yet to be put under the spotlight and microscope of real-typical (as well as ideal-typical) welfare regime analysis.

In the past, the development of real-typical welfare regime analysis in Europe and the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand) was developed, for example, by Castles and Mitchell (1991, 1993), Deacon (1992), Leibfried (1992), Ferrera (1993, 1996), Kangas (1994), Castles and Pierson (1996), Obinger and Wagschal (1998), Tomka (2006); Haggard and Kaufmann (2008), and Cerami and Vanhuysse (2009).

With regard to East Asia and Latin America too, a great number of social policy scholars engaged comparative real-typical welfare regime analysis, for example Huber (1996), Goodman et al. (1998), Holliday (2000), Wilding (2000), Barrientos (2004), Kwon (2005), Walker and Wong (2005), Lee and Ku (2007), Park and Jung (2008), Haggard and Kaufmann (2008), Choi (2012), Lue (2014), and Shi and Yeh (2016).

The differences between the ideal-typical and the real-typical method in comparative welfare regime analysis are very clear. Both methods try to classify welfare state systems, but on a different level, pursuing different perspectives and objectives (for a detailed discussion here cf. Aspalter, 2012) (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Ideal-typical and real-typical methods compared.

	Ideal-typical method	Real-typical method
Theoretical basis	The theory of Max Weber on ‘ideal-typical models’.	Researchers’ own set of indicators/system features.
Purpose	Focusing on average features of each regime cluster, it is used as a ‘yardstick’ to facilitate broad cross-national comparisons; as a consequence, minor and some major differences are omitted for the sake of better clarity on the ‘macro cross-national’ level.	Focusing on the reality of welfare state institutions, their similarities and differences across nations; hereby researchers focus on the detail, on institutional differences rather than their similarities, for better clarity on ‘micro cross-national’ level.
Major advantages and disadvantages	Advantages: 1. Delivers the greater picture; 2. focuses on functional equivalences (different systems or system structure deliver the same outcome, for example: housing ownership is functionally equivalent to pension income); 3. provides a perfect starting point for further real-typical welfare state regime analysis; 4. enables greater clarity on international and global level of welfare state, comparison, that is, it is very helpful when comparing a larger number of welfare state systems. Disadvantages: 1. details at national level may not appear, especially with regard to the institutional set-up of systems as well as administrative technicalities and legal provisions; 2. some important policy levels and areas may not appear; 3. one or another country may not fit, or may not easily fit in an ideal-typical model (not every welfare state system has to be part of an ideal-typical welfare regime, some are atypical or simply drifting in between different welfare regimes, or changing from one to another).	Advantages: 1. Delivers the detailed picture; 2. focuses on particular administrative and regulative set up, and legal and administrative technicalities, i.e. this methodology is more sensitive to program-level and short-term developments; 3. enables further analysis of welfare state institutions, also when building on knowledge derived from ideal-typical theories and models; 4. enables greater clarity on national and policy level in welfare state comparison. Disadvantages: 1. The grand picture at international level may be unclear or contradictory;2. some important similarities on international level, especially with regard to policy outcomes and strategies may be omitted (cf e.g. the importance of the principle of functional equivalence); 3. the models set up change quickly over time and often lack substance, i.e. a strong theoretical fundament.

Source: Based on Aspalter (2012).

Conclusion

In a nutshell, it cannot be overstressed that both those studies that (a) apply – explicitly or implicitly – the method of ideal types (in the Weberian sense) and (b) those that do not, and thus apply a real-typical method, are necessary to furthering the boundaries of social policy science. Both are synergetic; the one can use and build on the other (Aspalter, 2012). And both are needed to get the full (fullest possible) picture of everything that is going on and how everything is connected to everything (cf. Bottomore, 1972: 328–329; Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright, 2002: 78), or has been going on, and hence of what will (most likely) be going in the world of social politics, at world, world regional, national, local regional, and even city and county levels.

The debates of the past have shown that it is vital to make the distinction between ideal types and real types, in any study that envisions to conduct the business of setting up and/or applying welfare regime typologies. Then, if this had been done, a great number of misunderstandings as well as some delays in the development of overall welfare regime theories could have (most likely) been avoided. Esping-Andersen’s 1990 book did lead to advancements with regard to the development ideal-typical welfare regime theory, for example, with a novel attempt to categorize developing countries with a classification that is implicitly ideal-typical by Ian Gough (1999, 2004, 2013), as well as the extension of Esping-Andersen’s ideal-typical welfare regime theory to other regions of the world (e.g. Aspalter, 2006, 2011, 2017; Aspalter et al., 2009).

But more importantly, Esping-Andersen’s monumental breakthrough stirred up a sheer endless thirst to compare and analyze clusters of welfare state systems (their respective fields of social policy, policies, and programs a like) in all parts of the world, that have been formerly neglected by mainstream social policy research.

In the first one and a half decades (after Esping-Andersen’s 1990 book) of comparative social policy research in the area of welfare regime analysis, social policy experts were almost exclusively developing the method and theory of real-typical welfare regimes. In contrast, the last decade revealed a greater trend towards applying and developing ideal-typical welfare regime method and theory, or referring to its major findings. Applications and research studies applying an ideal-typical perspective have now started to be applied in or to most parts of the world (cf. earlier), and there is still a great deal of room for its growth.