Beyond familialism: Recalibrating family,state and market in Southern Europe and East Asia

Abstract

This Special Issue takes on a new cross-regional comparison between Southern Europe and East Asia in an attempt to identify ‘new politics’ of welfare state adjustments. Departing from the previous literature that overemphasized regional peculiarities of East Asian and Southern European welfare states, our Special Issue highlights family resemblances – among Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain. We argue that these four welfare states – often labelled as ‘familialist’ – share key common characteristics, which in turn experienced very similar policy problems in recent years. Interestingly, despite their initial similarities, these four countries have been trying to cope with new policy problems in different ways. In this process, some are clearly becoming less familialist. The main aim of this introductory article is to demonstrate the theoretical advantages based on the new cross-regional comparison. This article proceeds in three steps. First, it establishes the usefulness of the concept of family resemblances in our cross-regional comparison. Second, it presents a brief historical account of recent policy differences across the four countries going beyond familialism and shows that the existing theories fail to account for the new divergences. Third, it provides the overview of the Special Issue by explaining the research puzzles each paper tackles. We argue that these four welfare states, which are moving beyond familialism to varying degrees, represent heuristically helpful cases to explore the effects of both domestic and international political factors.

Keywords

East Asia familialism Southern Europe welfare reform welfare state

Beyond familialism

Many efforts have been made to expand the geographical coverage of welfare state studies to include Southern European, East Asian or East European countries, but very few scholars engage in cross-regional comparisons. Two books stand out as important exceptions: Development, Democracy, and Welfare States by Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman (2008) and Democracy and the Left by Evelyn Huber and John Stephens (2012). Haggard and Kaufman compared welfare states in Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe to highlight the importance of electoral competition in democracies as well as developmental strategies as factors that affect non-democratic governments’ propensity to invest in human capital. Huber and Stephens, in contrast, compared Latin American and Southern European welfare states to demonstrate the importance of democratic competition and the role of political parties.

This Special Issue carries out a new cross-regional comparison of East Asia and Southern Europe – more specifically, Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – in order to contribute to the European literature on welfare state adjustments, including retrenchments, recalibration and protection of new social risks (NSRs) (Armingeon and Bonoli, 2006; Bonoli, 2013; Bonoli and Natali, 2012; Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Hemerijck, 2015; Häusermann, 2010; Morel et al., 2012; Palier and Martin, 2007; Taylor-Gooby, 2004). Our aim is to highlight cross-national variations that have been overlooked in the literature. Instead of paying close attention to regional specificities, as most studies of the East Asian and Southern European social policy do, we highlight the comparability of Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain.¹

As this introductory article will demonstrate, these four countries had all developed similar welfare states and labour markets by the late 1990s. Similar features include the following: (1) their welfare states developed in occupationally segmented ways mostly in order to protect the core male workforce; (2) despite rapid industrialization, there still remained a large number of self-employed and family workers resulting in a segmented labour market; (3) social services and active labour market policies were under-developed; and (4) women were very slow to be integrated into the formal regular workforce. Although it is not a perfect fit, the concept of familialism – defined as an emphasis upon the family as the primary locus of welfare provision by way of intra- and inter-generational mutual aid – captures adequately the family resemblance of these four among our countries (Naldini, 2003). The concept of familialism is generally associated with very specific gender relations, where women are expected to be the carers of young and old family members (Lister, 1994; Saraceno, 1994). Simply stated, welfare state protects male core workers, but everything else falls upon the family. The Northern Continental European Countries such as Austria, Germany and the Netherlands share certain features of familialism since they too have – or had until recently – strong male-breadwinner orientations. But in these countries, social safety nets have been much more generous than in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain. As a consequence, the family has played a much more important role as a welfare provider in these four countries. Esping-Andersen’s welfare state taxonomy does not capture these distinctions very well because it was developed primarily as a way to distinguish social democratic welfare regimes from other types (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1997). For this reason, we have decided not to use the concept of welfare regimes, and use the term family resemblances instead.

The concept of ‘family resemblances’ is not new to scholars of comparative politics. Collier and Mahon (1993) have provided the most methodologically rigorous definition. Citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, they argue that the ‘idea of family resemblances entails a principle of category membership different from that of classical categories in that there may be no single attribute that category members all share’ (Collier and Mahon, 1993: 847). Thus, we can think of a group of countries that share numerous similar attributes, but the specific combination of attributes might vary within the group. As Goertz (2012: 36) notes, family resemblances do not have any necessary conditions but only sufficient conditions, which, when present, constitute a family. Ferrera (this issue) succinctly describes family resemblances as ‘a likeness, which is elusive, but stands out almost intuitively when we observe a set of units/cases’.

Castles (1993: xv), in turn, uses the term ‘families of nations’ to show how similar experiences might generate similar policy outcomes. He emphasizes the two following features: ‘First, there are groupings of nations that to varying degrees share common historical and cultural experiences. Second, families of nations defined in this sense do, in some areas, appear to manifest rather similar policy outcomes’.

While Castles believes that geographic proximity gives rise to common historical and cultural experiences, we do not think of geographic proximity as a necessary condition. Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain share commonalities in their historical and cultural experiences despite differences in the timing of democratization and economic take-off. Italy and Japan democratized after their defeat in the Second World War, while Spain and Korea democratized much later – in the mid-1970s and late 1980s, respectively. The latter pair went through similar political and economic developments as did the former pair, however, with a lag of about 30–40 years. Korea and Spain both entered the welfare state catch-up phase after transitioning to democracy (Guillén and León, 2011). Notwithstanding this difference in timing, the two regions also share common cultural experiences. When it comes to family matters, the moral teaching of Catholicism is not that different from Confucianism and its derivatives in Korea and Japan.

The intellectual merit of our cross-regional project lies in the critical relevance of our country cases in thinking about the politics of NSRs. Many scholars have recognized that welfare reforms involve retrenchments, welfare expansions and recalibrations – all in an effort to address NSRs. These efforts include extending social policies for motherhood and parenthood, eldercare and targeted programmes for precarious groups (Bonoli, 2013; Bonoli and Natali, 2012; Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Morel et al., 2012). This is precisely the area of welfare state studies where the most heated debates are unfolding. Today, there is a growing awareness that the politics of NSRs is very different from the politics of ‘old welfare state programmes’ (Bonoli, 2013; Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015; Kasza, 2006; Morgan, 2013; Schmitt and Starke, 2011). Yet despite this realization, most theories of welfare reform rest on the experience of a few ‘mainstream’ conservative welfare regimes: France, Germany and the Netherlands, in particular. The literature tends to portray Southern Europe as a region that has failed to take the bold actions of the Northern Continental European countries (Bonoli, 2013; Knijn and Saraceno, 2010). Very few studies branch out of the European mould and compare the East Asian countries. This is a serious neglect because, as we know, the need to extend social protection for NSRs is most acute in male-breadwinner-oriented and familialist welfare states. The need for such protection in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain is even more urgent than in Northern Continental European countries, not least because these four countries face the fastest demographic ageing. Needless to say, the growing ranks of the elderly coupled with plummeting fertility rates generate enormous policy challenges. There is no more important practical question than that of how to respond to this demographic problem.

The cross-regional comparisons pursued here generate fertile grounds for exploring new causal explanations. The four countries under review demonstrate important variations in terms of the degree of retrenchment of insiders’ benefits, expansions in benefits and services for marginal workers and the frail elderly, investments in work–family reconciliation policies and in female employment patterns. While the studies of old welfare programmes emphasize the causal importance of organized labour and social democracy, new studies of NSR programmes generally pay more attention to women’s new policy preferences and party competition (Bonoli, 2013; Morgan, 2013). As the articles included in this issue make clear, however, the causal variables used to explain policy developments in Northern Continental European countries fail to account for variations in our four countries. Note that this failure has nothing to do with any alleged cultural uniqueness of East Asia. Although there exist important regional differences – that is, the influx of cheap-care migrants into Italy and Spain but not in Japan and Korea – there is a remarkable degree of variation that cuts across regions (Bettio et al., 2006; Estévez-Abe and Kim, 2013). In the rest of this introduction, we discuss the cross-regional similarities circa 2000 and then highlight new differences that emerged in more recent decades. It is these new differences that each of the empirical articles in the issue explores.

Family resemblances in East Asia and Southern Europe circa 2000

This section establishes how our four countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – share very similar welfare state and labour market characteristics. Table 1 compares them with other 14 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on different dimensions of welfare state characteristics and outcomes including social security programme composition, poverty, employment and family issues circa 2000. We choose 2000 as the benchmark year to establish the presence of family resemblances in an earlier period as a way of setting the stage for the rest of the articles in this issue as they all focus on recent transformations in the four countries.

Table 1.

Country rankings on key dimensions of famialialism circa 2000.

Country Ranking	The State			Market			Family	Redistribution
Country Ranking	Age-bias	Paid maternity	Social Service	Employment Gender Gap	Employment Protection	Self-employment	Elderly living with children	Poverty Rate
1	Japan	Norway	Sweden	Spain	Netherlands	Korea	Korea	US
2	Italy	Finland	Denmark	Italy	Italy	Italy	Japan	Japan
3	US	Sweden	Norway	Japan	Austria	New Zealand	Spain	Spain
4	Korea	Denmark	Finland	Korea	Germany	Spain	Italy	Korea
5	Austria	France	UK	Netherlands	Sweden	Japan	Belgium	Italy
6	Germany	Austria	France	Austria	Korea	Belgium	US	Australia
7	France	Canada	Australia	Belgium	Spain	Finland	UK	Canada
8	Spain	Germany	Austria	Australia	France	Australia	Austria	UK
9	Canada	Belgium	Netherlands	Germany	Norway	Austria	Finland	New Zealand
10	Belgium	Italy	Germany	New Zealand	Finland	UK	France	Belgium
11	UK	Spain	New Zealand	France	Denmark	Netherlands	Norway	Germany
12	Australia	Japan	Belgium	UK	Belgium	Germany	Germany	France
13	New Zealand	UK	Japan	US	Japan	Canada	Netherlands	Austria
14	Sweden	New Zealand	Spain	Canada	Australia	Sweden	Denmark	Netherland
15	Norway	Australia	US	Denmark	UK	France	Sweden	Norway
16	Netherlands	Korea	Canada	Norway	New Zealand	Denmark	Canada	Finland
17	Finland	Netherlands	Italy	Finland	Canada	US	–	Sweden
18	Denmark	US	Korea	Sweden	US	Norway	–	Denmark

Note: see Appendix 1 for detailed data and sources.

Table 1 illustrates broad similarities among Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain by ranking them on a number of key institutional and socio-economic characteristics along with other OECD countries. These characteristics include the following: (1) age-bias of social spending programmes; (2) government spending on paid maternity and parental leaves as a percentage of GDP; (3) government spending on social services as a percentage of GDP; (4) gender gap in employment rates; (5) strictness of employment protection – OECD’s EPL(Employment Protection Legislation) index; (6) the size of self-employment as a percentage of workforce; (7) percentage of elderly living with their children; and (8) poverty rates.

Our four countries stand out for their age-bias – bias in favour of pension and health care, which mostly benefited the elderly in 2000. Italy and Japan were the most age-biased countries, followed by Korea and Spain. The strong age-bias also implies meagre and under-developed benefits and services for working-age citizens and their families. Indeed, our four countries were in the bottom of the ranking in the generosity of paid maternity and parental leaves and spending on social services as a percentage of GDP. It is also important to pay close attention to the labour market structure. As shown in Table 1, most of our four countries had stricter employment protection legislation as well as bigger shares of self-employed than other OECD countries. These labour market characteristics suggest highly segmented employment structures between those who enjoy good jobs with social protection and those who do not (Berton et al., 2012). It should be pointed out that Table 1 underestimates the strength of employment protection in Japan, where it is not the labour law but the accumulation of case laws set by the courts that narrows the scope of permissible reasons for job termination (Berton et al., 2012).

Table 1 suggests that, compared to other OECD countries, the welfare states in our four countries did not protect all working-age citizens and their families in 2000. While they protected jobs of core workers, they left many with an inadequate social safety net. Nor did they provide sufficient support for work–family reconciliation. As a result, their citizens had to rely on their families to a much greater extent than in other advanced countries. Table 1 uses the percentage of the elderly who cohabit with their adult children as a measure of strong family bonds (e.g. filial duty). Our four countries were definitely among those with ‘strong families’, and hence more familialist than other OECD countries. Table 1, however, shows that familialism does not protect citizens from poverty (Ferrera, 2005; Osawa, 2013). Indeed, poverty rates are higher in this group of countries, and gender gaps in employment rates are the biggest in this group. Table 1 also shows that familialism comes with lower labour market integration of women in general, making families dependent on male earnings.

In short, Table 1 captures the family resemblances in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain as of 2000. As mentioned, the concept of family resemblances does not require that the countries ‘in the family’ share all of the key attributes. The concept of resemblances is not the same as a taxonomy. That said, our four countries do share similarities across different areas – both welfare states, labour market and family types – and, as a result, demonstrate similar effects in women’s employment rates and poverty rates. This is markedly different from a country like the United States, which clusters together with our four countries in the age-bias of social spending and the meagre public support for work–family reconciliation, but has a very different labour market compared to the four countries in our study. The same can be said of Austria and Germany, which many scholars consider male-breadwinner-oriented welfare states like those in Southern Europe (Daly and Rake, 2003; Lewis, 1992; Lewis and Ostner, 1994; Sainsbury, 1996). However, Austria and Germany were decisively different from our ‘family of nations’, where the social safety net was much weaker and inter-generational mutual help was much stronger. When we look at the percentages of elderly living with their adult children or the poverty rates, the difference is even more evident.

Although it would potentially be a fruitful line of comparative research to investigate the origins of these family resemblances, here it suffices to point out that they share a similar political economic developmental path. Italy and Japan went down this path first; Spain and Korea followed some decades later. The main aim of this Special Issue is to understand how and why these four countries began to change – sometimes branching off down very different paths.

Transformations and divergence: the role of politics

The previous section focused on how our four countries compared circa 2000. A lot has changed in the past 15–20 years. Labour markets have been liberalized and have become even more dualized. The number of old people has continued to rise, while fertility rates have continued to decline. However, the way in which the four countries have responded to the new challenges has varied. Today, we observe significant cross-national variations in the patterns of welfare reforms and recalibrations in the four countries. Some patterns of variations cut across regions, others occur along regional lines. Three sets of variations stand out in particular.

First, some of the four countries under study have defamilialized the provision of care to a greater degree than others. Korea and Spain implemented bolder policy shifts to reduce their familialism, while Italy and Japan lagged behind. Ironically, the two late-comers caught up and overtook the early developers (see articles by Sacareno and by Estévez-Abe and Naldini in this issue). Korea and Spain expanded childcare and eldercare by turning them into new social rights, while Japan only did this in eldercare. Italy was a laggard here, which is surprising since Italy was a forerunner in introducing paid parental leave (Saraceno, 2003).

Second, a sub-group of the four countries have significantly expanded protection for marginal workers. Italy, Korea and Spain strengthened the social safety net for such workers to a much greater degree than did Japan (Guillén, 2008; Osawa, 2013; Sacchi and Jungho, this issue). Given the fact that familialist welfare states in the two regions used to be characterized by a highly skewed system of social protection – which primarily served male core workers – expansion of social protection to marginal workers marked a significant deviation from the old system. The variation in this programme area is different from that observed in the defamilialization of care. If Italy is the laggard when it comes to defamilialization of care, Japan is the laggard in extending a social safety net for marginal workers.

Third, although female employment rates are generally lower in familialist systems (see Table 1), the pattern of women’s integration into the labour market varies significantly even when work–family reconciliation policies are roughly similar. Despite the strong family resemblances, women’s employment patterns became very different in the four countries. Here, the variation follows regional lines. Italian and Spanish women – university-educated women in particular – have made a lot more progress than their counterparts in Japan and Korea (Estévez-Abe, 2013). The maternal employment rates of university-educated women in Italy and Spain are much higher even than in Northern Continental European countries.

What accounts for these variations? Why did Korea and Spain introduce bigger policy shifts to defamilialize care? Why did Japan, which managed to introduce a new form of social insurance to tackle the problem of frail elderly, nonetheless do so little to expand childcare provision and social safety nets for precarious workers? Similarly, why did Italy fail to introduce significant changes in childcare and eldercare while it succeeded in expanding the social safety net?

Neither of the causal explanations used to explain the introduction of ‘old welfare programmes’ or the expansion of NSR programmes in Northern Continental European countries seems to account for the cross-national variations in our cases. In 2000, the union density rates were 34.8 and 21.5 percent in Italy and Japan, respectively, while they were only 16.6 percent in Spain and 11.4 percent in Korea (OECD, 2015). However, higher union density has not translated into left-wing governments in Italy and Japan. To the contrary, despite their weak organized labour, Korea and Spain have had more left-wing (Koreans use the term ‘progressive’) governments. Did the more left-wing/progressive nature of politics play a role in the two countries’ willingness to provide new benefits and services for the NSRs? How does this square with the argument that the partisan orientation of governments explains very little when it comes to policy variations in protection for NSRs (Bonoli, 2005; Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015)? Some scholars suggest an alternative causal process: stronger unions in countries such as Italy and Japan function as veto players (Song, 2012). Could it then be the case that weak unions in Korea and Spain enabled bigger policy shifts? But can this explain how Italy – along with Korea and Spain – expanded the social safety net for marginal workers? Rueda (2005) makes it clear that union members care more about protecting their employment than extending a safety net for others.

Scholars of NSR policies highlight the causal importance of new factors such as the number of female legislators, women’s attitudinal changes, party competition and the magnitude of problems (Bonoli, 2013; Bonoli and Natali, 2012; Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; Morgan, 2013). Among our four countries, Spain is the only one that has a level of female political representation higher than the OECD average. The dramatic rise in the percentage of children born out of wedlock in Spain from 1.4 percent in 1970 to 31.7 percent in 2011 suggests that the societal mores in Spain are fundamentally different today. The percentages of children born out of wedlock only increased from 2.3 percent to 17.7 percent in Italy, while they remained roughly the same in Japan and Korea, where the rates are still 2.2 and 2.1 percent, respectively, in 2011.² Some scholars think that the attitudinal change affects value-based party competition (Häusermann, 2006; Morgan, 2013). If we look at the Spanish case only within the European context, this argument appears plausible. The number of female legislators is much lower in Italy, and the percentage of children born out of wedlock is one-third of Spain. However, our cross-regional comparison challenges such a facile conclusion. The percentages of female legislators and children born out of wedlock are both very low in Korea, but Korea has largely defamilialized care. Today, its enrolment rates of young children under the age of 3 in formal childcare facilities are well above the OECD average. Similarly, the percentage of female legislators and attitudinal shifts do not explain why Italy’s policy for defamilialization lags behind that of Korea and Japan. Nor do these features explain why Japan implemented a new long-term care insurance to address eldercare but did relatively little in childcare.

Bringing in the East Asian cases helps us test the validity of recent causal arguments about the expansion of NSR policies. These cases also open the door to new causal arguments. For instance, we embed party competition in a more nuanced institutional context. To say that political parties compete over new interests and values does not add much to our knowledge. What we need to know is the institutional context under which political parties become more responsive to what kinds of societal changes (Estévez-Abe, 2008). Incentives to make bold policy promises depend on electoral rules and party systems. Moreover, party competition cannot be the end of the story. Even when a party wins, there is no guarantee that it can implement the policies that it promised during the election. Whether a winning party can implement policies or not is a function of the government structure. Our four countries offer important variations on possible independent variables. The agenda-setting power of the premier varies significantly across the four countries. Korea is the only presidential system and has a president elected by popular vote. As head of the state, a president has the power to operate the executive branch and to lead the country, including appointing a prime minister and other ministers. The other three countries are parliamentary systems, but the prime ministers’ powers vary quite dramatically among them. Spain had a majoritarian government until the popular discontent following the financial crisis destabilized the dominance of the two largest parties (see Estévez-Abe and Naldini, this issue). According to O’Malley (2007), the prime minister’s power is high in Spain (6.92), whereas it is low in Italy (4.98) and Japan (4.61). Italy and Japan have both changed their prime ministers very frequently, around 40 times between 1946 and present in Italy. In contrast, Spain has only had five prime ministers since democratization in 1975. Together with a moderate multiparty system and party discipline, the cabinet stability has been one of the important features in Spanish politics (Linz et al., 2003: 28).

We also need to consider the role of supra-national agencies, such as the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are especially salient in the welfare politics in Southern Europe and parts of Asia. (This factor rarely emerges in studies of welfare state recalibrations based solely on Northern Continental European countries.) According to the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact, the ratio of the annual general governmental deficit to GDP had to be less than 3 percent, and the government debt-to-GDP ratio could not exceed 60 percent. These constraints placed Italy and Spain under pressure to restructure and rationalize their welfare states. Membership in the EU partly explains restrictive welfare reforms, such as pensions and unemployment benefits in the 1990s (Ferrera and Gualmini, 2004; Guillén, 2008; Jessoula and Alti, 2010; Sacchi, 2007; Schludi, 2005). During the Eurozone crisis, Italy and Spain again came under intense pressure from the ECB. Here, the austerity measures that the IMF imposed on Korea during the Asian Financial Crisis provide an interesting point of comparison. Of the four countries under study, Japan was the only net creditor country that did not face any external pressures. Was the effect of fiscal pressures from the ECB similar or different to the pressures from the IMF? Is it a coincidence that Italy, Korea and Spain, which faced more external pressures, are the ones that expanded social safety nets in our four cases?

Variations in the employment patterns of women – especially educated women – in East Asia and southern Europe are also puzzling. Many of the programmes for NSR involve the activation of under-employed citizens such as married women. However, employment rates of educated mothers in southern Europe have been higher than the OECD average in spite of policy support for work-family reconciliation. What factors explain the conspicuous cross-regional variations that cannot be accounted for by differences in social policy? Do factors such as differences in working time, types of career formation and the availability of cheap domestic workers explain the gap between East Asia and southern Europe (see Estévez-Abe, 2013)? The influx of low-skill migrants has certainly been much bigger in Italy and Spain than in Korea and Japan, creating an abundant supply of domestic workers in the first two countries (Estévez-Abe, 2015).

In short, the juxtaposition of East Asia and Southern Europe makes us aware of new sets of cross-national variations, prompting us to ask new questions. As a result, comparisons of Southern Europe not with Northern Europe but with East Asia expand the scope of our research agenda significantly.

Looking ahead: special issue contributions

Saraceno’s article, which immediately follows this introductory article, compares the policy profiles of familialism in the four countries. As she has argued elsewhere, it is important to distinguish three types of government policy: (1) familialism by default, where the state prescribes welfare obligations to the family but offers no financial support (e.g. having a civil code that stipulates the welfare obligations among kins), (2) supported familialism, where the state recognizes and financially supports the welfare role of the family by means of cash transfers and tax subsidies (e.g. family allowance, paid parental leaves); and (3) defamilialization, whereby the state takes over or subsidizes the marketization of care functions of the family (Saraceno and Keck, 2010). She finds that Japan, Korea and Spain have moved in the direction of greater defamilialization of care, while Spain also significantly scaled back its supported familialism. She identifies Italy as a country that has not taken any concrete steps to reform its pre-existing policy profile. Instead, the lack of any clear reform combined with the influx of migrant workers in Italy has given rise to the ‘migrant-in-the-family’ model, whereby families who could afford it hired informal help at home (Bettio et al., 2006; Naldini and Saraceno, 2008).

Estévez-Abe and Naldini’s article challenges the current literature on NSR by articulating a new causal argument to account for cross-national variations in policy outcomes in defamilialization of care in Italy, Japan, Spain and Korea. As already mentioned, Korea and Spain legislated bigger policy shifts concerning defamilializatoin of care – both in childcare and in eldercare. Japan did implement a big policy shift in eldercare (e.g. the introduction of a new long-term care insurance) but not in childcare. Italy changed little and saw no major policy shift concerning childcare or eldercare. Estévez-Abe and Naldini argue that the specific constellation of political institutions shapes the contours of the nature of politics. They claim that electoral rules, party systems and the government structure in Korea and Spain generated incentives for majoritarian politics whereby the main political parties mobilize voters on the bases of policy promises. This institutional context, they argue, made political parties more responsive to societal change as well as enabling the winner to influence the policy agenda and outcome. They attribute big policy shifts in Korea and Spain to what they call ‘election-oriented’ politics. In contrast, no such change occurred in Italy and Japan, where the institutional preconditions for election-oriented politics were absent. In these countries, they identify another path to defamilialization, which they name ‘policy-oriented’ change. They contrast Italy and Japan to show how the pre-existing social policy exacerbated the problem of shortage of care services for frail elderly in Japan, while it made it less acute in Italy.

The article by León, Choi and Ahn pays attention to different employment consequences for women. It focuses on Korea and Spain – the two late-comers whose political structures share important similarities as identified by Estévez-Abe and Naldini’s article. Although Korea and Spain have both gone through labour market deregulation, which hurt job prospects for women, León et al. find important differences in the employment patterns of women in the two countries. First, they find that the so-called M-curve of female labour force participation rates – which is caused by the withdrawal of women from the labour market during their child-bearing years – has largely disappeared in Spain but not in Korea. Second, they find that there are a lot more women in high-status occupation in Spain than in Korea. Spanish educated women enjoy an earnings premium on par with educated men, but Korean women do not, and many of them withdraw from the labour market when they become mothers. Given the fact that the two countries share similar social policy and labour market conditions, they seek explanations elsewhere. After considering factors such as women’s educational levels and the length of working hours, they conclude that the difference between the two countries lies in the degree of cultural transformation. Spain democratized in the mid-1970s, while Korea only democratized in the late 1980s. They argue that active women’s advocacy group played an important role in bringing about a much bigger societal change in Spain and also contributing to improving working conditions for women. Korean women fare worse than Spanish women because Korea is still caught in the middle of a cultural transformation – old habits have not died, new ones are yet to be born.

Sacchi and Roh’s article compares Italy and Korea in their social policy adaptation to economic crisis. It examines how conditionality and austerity affect familialistic welfare states in financial distress. As mentioned earlier, familialistic welfare states protect core male workers while leaving the rest to rely on the family during difficult times. So what happens when such countries need to be bailed out by a supra-national entity after a severe financial crisis? Counterintuitively, they argue that conditionality and austerity measures can help overhaul welfare states in the direction of expanding social safety nets. In countries such as Italy and Korea, where the welfare state does little to protect working-age people, the debt crisis served as a turning point to reallocate resources from labour market insiders to outsiders. Sacchi and Roh chose to compare Italy and Korea precisely because their domestic political structure and government compositions are dissimilar: decision-making power is more decentralized in Italy than in Korea. The comparative design they adopt is the method of agreement carried out on a pair of the most dissimilar cases. Sacchi and Roh want to show that even in very different political systems, external pressures can create a similar political opening. Korea experienced a severe economic crisis in 1997 prompting a bailout by the IMF. The IMF imposed on Korea tough austerity measures despite the fact that the Korean government budget had always been balanced. In the Italian case, the IMF was not involved, and formal conditionality was not imposed. Yet there was something like an implicit conditionality agreed upon with the ECB. Sacchi and Roh argue that the conditionality that the two countries faced was functionally equivalent and produced similar progressive effects in terms of welfare expansion, or recalibration.

Ferrera’s theoretical article concludes our Special Issue. He revisits the concept of ‘family resemblances’ from a philosophical and methodological angle. Ferrera’s essay reminds us of the value of the Weberian intellectual tradition and the importance of sensitivities to historical trajectories. On reading this essay, one realizes that we have perhaps all become too used to treating welfare states merely as constellations of ‘variables’ or something easily captured by indices. Both statistical and taxonomical approaches have pushed the research agenda in that direction. Without denying the gains that we have made in methodological rigour, Ferrera reminds us that welfare states are embedded in culture and history. He delves into the cultural affinities that exist in the quartet of countries and puts them in a historical perspective. Although the issue has not focused on the origin of East Asian and Southern European welfare states, Ferrera lays the ground for such work. His essay concludes with a list of questions yet to be explored. Graduate students in search of dissertation topics will find this list invaluable.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix 1

Detailed Data Circa 2000 for Table 1.

		Italy	Spain	Japan	Korea	Sweden	Denmark	Norway	Finland	Germany	France	Netherlands	Belgium	Austria	UK	US	Canada	Australia	New Zealand
STATE (Social security system)	Age-bias Paid Maternity and Parental Leave	0.830.14	0.690.14	0.850.12	0.740.0	0.560.59	0.470.52	0.540.75	0.540.61	0.720.2	0.700.4	0.540	0.720.17	0.610.39	0.610.07	0.80–	0.630.23	0.590.23	0.570.04
	Age-bias Paid Maternity and Parental Leave	0.830.14	0.690.14	0.850.12	0.740.0	0.560.59	0.470.52	0.540.75	0.540.61	0.720.2	0.700.4	0.540	0.720.17	0.610.39	0.610.07	0.80–	0.630.23	0.590.23	0.570.04
	Social Service	0.82	1.28	1.31	0.26	6.31	5.72	4.59	3.34	1.82	2.8	2.08	1.33	2.09	3.14	1.13	1.05	2.54	1.46
MARKET (Labor market)	Employment Gender Gap	28.68	30.75	24.15	23.08	4.11	8.60	7.73	6.06	14.76	13.98	18.46	17.86	17.94	13.39	12.84	10.53	15.66	14.68
	Employment protection legislation	2.88	2.36	1.7	2.37	2.65	2.13	2.33	2.31	2.68	2.34	2.88	1.85	2.75	1.26	0.26	0.92	1.42	1.24
	Self-employment	28.49	20.17	16.61	38.85	10.29	9.12	7.39	13.70	10.96	9.26	11.21	15.79	13.12	12.82	7.42	10.61	13.52	20.56
Family	Elderly living with Children	29	42.4	43.2	54.7	2.6	2.7	11.0	12.9	6.0	11.1	5.0	21.8	14.1	14.5	18	0.08	–	–
Redistribution	Poverty rate	12.2	14.8²⁾	15.3	14.3⁵⁾	5.3	5.1	6.3	5.5	7.6	7.1	6.6	8.7²⁾	6.8²⁾	11.0	16.9	11.4	12.2	9.8

Notes and sources:

Age-bias = (Social expenditure on old age pension, survivors pension and health)/social expenditure; OECD SOCX database, http://stats.oecd.org.

Paid Maternity and Parental Leave : % of GDP for 2002; OECD SOCX database, http://stats.oecd.org.

Social Service = (In-kind – Health, % of GDP); OECD SOCX database, http://stats.oecd.org.

Employment Gender Gap = (15-65 years old Male – Female employment rates); OECD Labour database, LFS by sex and age – indicators, http://stats.oecd.org.

Employment protection legislation: Version 1, regular contract; OECD Labour database, http://stats.oecd.org.

Self-employment:,https://data.oecd.org/emp/Self-employment-rate.htm

Elderly living with Children: Maria Lacovou and Alexandra Skew. 2010. “Household Structure in the EU,” ISER Working Paper Series (December 2010), Table 7. This table listed % by sex. Therefore, % of females was used. Thus they are not directly comparable with the percentages for Japan, Korea, Canada, and the US which show the average percentage of both men and women.; for Canada, Canada Census 2001, http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Elderly-living-with-children; 2000 for South Korea, Japan and US, 2001 for Canada, 2002 for Norway, 2006 for Canada, 2007 for Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium and Austria.

Poverty rate: after tax and transfer, below 50% of median income; https://stats.oecd.org; 2004 for Japan, Belgium and Austria; 2006 for Korea.

Acknowledgements

The guest editors and all of the contributors to this Special Issue are extremely grateful to Traute Meyer and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have played an important role in improving the quality of the issue. The authors specially thank Stephen Haggard, Takeshi Ito, Matteo Jessoula, Mari Osawa and Susan Pharr, who participated in the workshops at Collegio Carlo Alberto (Turin) and gave us invaluable feedback on our project.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A3A2052898). Margarita Estévez-Abe also thanks the research support by Abe Fellowship funded by the Center for Global Partnership and administered by the Social Science Research Council. The authors also like to thank Suntory Foundation for co-funding the workshops and Collegio Carlo Alberto for hosting the workshops.

Notes

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