Documents Scruggs, Lyle 4 results

"International comparisons of national social policy rely overwhelmingly on programme spending ratios. However, there are widespread problems with this type of data as an indicator of trends in societies' commitments to social protection. This paper suggests an alternative approach to understanding social commitments and introduces a new international data set of social insurance programmes that is comprised of important characteristics of three types of public insurance: unemployment, sick pay, and public pensions. The data are available annually from the 1970s for 18 OECD countries. Looking more closely at trends in two programme characteristics, income replacement rates and programme coverage, we develop an indicator of expected benefits. According to this indicator, there is considerably more evidence of welfare state retrenchment in recent years than most analyses of public spending have suggested. "

"We present and discuss a replication and reassessment of the welfare-state decommodification index, and introduce a new, publicly available data set of key welfare-state programme characteristics. Using the same programme features used to create the ‘decommodification index' in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, one of the most widely cited sources in the field, we are able to replicate the results quite closely. However, our investigation suggests a number of likely errors in the original formulation. Once these are accounted for, we find very limited empirical support for the ‘three worlds' typology in the decommodification data. Though some clear differences remain, there is also much less overall variation among countries. Furthermore, there is little evidence of ‘clustering' among programme scores, a finding which is at odds with the idea of distinctive national regimes. Our results point to the need for a detailed re-investigation of welfare-state benefits in advanced industrial democracies. Our data set helps to provide a basis for such an assessment."

"The goal of this paper is to establish if unemployment insurance policies are more generous in Europe than in the United States, and by how much. We take the examples of France and one particular American state, Ohio, and use the methodology of Pallage, Scruggs and Zimmermann (2008) to find a unique parameter value for each region that fully characterizes the generosity of the system. These two values can then be used in structural models that compare the regions, for example to explain the differences in unemployment rates."

"This article highlights the limitations of unidimensional analyses in the comparative welfare state literature and emphasises the need for a more holistic, multidimensional approach incorporating welfare state inputs, outputs, and outcomes. To illustrate the utility of a multidimensional approach, we examine the long-term welfare state trajectories of Sweden and Germany, prototypical social-democratic and conservative welfare states, respectively, and compare them against the baseline of Europe's prototypical liberal welfare state, the United Kingdom. The input (expenditure) and output (generosity) allowed us to identify significant changes in the Swedish welfare state (i.e., retrenchment). The outcome dimension alerts us to a policy drift in the German Welfare State, as relatively stable public spending and welfare generosity until the first half of the 2000s were nonetheless associated with sharply increased inequality and poverty. Overall, our findings suggest that a holistic, multidimensional approach is necessary to fully understand the complexities of welfare state change and continuity, as focusing solely on one dimension can lead to analytical misjudgements. The sharp rise in inequality and poverty across countries raises doubts about whether policymakers and researchers rely too much on outdated assumptions of normality that fail to meet the welfare state realities of today."