Esping-Andersen's "Three World of Welfare Capitalism" has been the most influential contribution of recent years to the comparative welfare state research literature. According to Esping-Andersen, the welfare state basically comes in three variants: as a social-democratic, a conservative, or as...

Studies of the welfare state usually try to find out which factors have contributed to its ascendancy since the end of the nineteenth century and which factors explain the various approaches different countries took in providing a new social insurance to cover new social risks in industrialized...