Defamilisation and welfare state regimes: a cluster analysis

By C. Bambra. 2007

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The role of gender as a source of social stratification within and between welfare states is increasingly being paid attention to in the welfare state regimes debate. Defamilisation has emerged as a potentially important concept in this context, as it enables the comparison and classification of welfare states in terms of how they facilitate female autonomy and economic independence from the family. However, the methodology used, or the understanding of the concept, limits existing defamilisation typologies. These typologies have therefore been unable to provide an accurate examination of welfare state variation using this concept and, indeed, have in some ways undermined and devalued the usefulness of defamilisation. This article uses cluster analysis to build upon previous research and resurrect the concept of defamilisation. In contrast to existing work in this area, the analysis produces a five-fold typology of welfare state regimes. This typology differs in many ways from existing models of welfare state regimes, although some core countries emerge as regime ideal types. The article concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of cluster analysis, and defamilisation, for welfare state modelling and future research in this area.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23f9cb9735702b2b2e07a5e3ea43308a79633195

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Citations in the corpus

Gender differences in depression in 23 European countries. Cross-national variation in the gender gap in depression. (2010, background): “Women’s economic power is directly related to the extent to which a welfare state enables women to survive as independent workers and decreases women’s economic dependence on the family (Bambra, 2007).”
Labour markets and the (hyphenated) welfare regime in Latin America (2009, background): “Bambra (2006, 2007) provides a recent examination of these two concepts and their empirical counterparts.”
An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business (2011, methodology): “For example, much of the regimes classification rely on de-commodification scores (Bambra 2007b; 2007c), while Obinger and Wagschal (2001) draw on Castles’ (1998) examination of patterns of public policy in 21 OECD countries using 29 variables in three broad classes (socio-economic;…”
Welfare regimes and welfare state outcomes in Europe (2012, background): “See, for example, Obinger and Wagschal (2001), Gough (2001), Saint-Arnaud and Bernard (2003), Bambra (2007) and Jensen (2008), who apply cluster analyses to empirically test welfare state typologies on the basis of different output measures.”