Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions V. 5

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5 Governance: An Int'l J. Pol'y, Admin, & Institutions 1 (1992)

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Identifying Welfare State Regimes: The Links
Between Politics, Instruments and Outcomes

FRANCIS G. CASTLES and DEBORAH MITCHELL

With new sources of cross-national data appearing on income distribution
and the characteristics of redistributional policy instruments, it is now
possible to take the comparative analysis of welfare states well beyond the
conventional focus on government expenditures. This study of 18 OECD
nations examines the linkages between various aspects of the income redis-
tribution process, elaborates a typology of welfare state regimes and locates
the political origins of each of these regimes.

Until very recently, empirical research on comparative social policy
rested almost entirely on comparisons of welfare spending by govern-
ments. Following Wilensky (1975), these comparisons take the form of
a welfare effort measure which expresses public social expenditure
as a percentage of national product. This measure is intended to reflect
the degree of each nation's commitment to the reduction of poverty
and income inequality, if only in financial terms. The measurement of
welfare effort became the central focus of quantitative comparative re-
search, less because of its intrinsic interest than because it was the most
easily available (or only available) quantitative indicator of state inter-
vention particularly in the field of income redistribution (Castles 1989).
Now that situation is changing, with advances being made in several
areas which allow the exploration and comparison of welfare states to
proceed on a far more sophisticated basis than is otherwise possible
when restricted to expenditure levels.
Perhaps the most ambitious of these advances is the collection of
microdata sets being assembled by the Luxembourg Income Study Proj-
ect (LIS). Where earlier we had no reliable cross-national indicators of
policy outcomes in terms of measured levels of poverty and inequality,
the standardized data sets now held by LIS allow us to contrast the
redistributive performance of some 10 OECD countries on the basis of
its first wave of data for the early 1980s, and an increasing number of
nations on the basis of later waves (Smeeding et al. 1990; Mitchell 1991).
A second advance is the SSIBI data set developed at the Swedish
Institute of Social Research since 1981. Unlike earlier analyses of the
Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration. Vol. 5, No. 1, January 1992
(pp. 1-26), © 1992. Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government
of the International Political Science Association. ISSN 0952-1895