"The protracted debate on the welfare state has failed to produce conclusive answers as to either the nature or causes of welfare state development. This article has three aims: 1) to reintegrate the debate into the intellectual tradition of political economy. This serves to put into sharper focus the principal theoretical questions involved; 2) to specify what are the salient characteristics of welfare states. The conventional ways of measuring welfare states in terms of their expenditures will no Ionger do; 3) to 'sociologize' the study of welfare states. Most studies have assumed a world of linearity: more or less power, industrialization or spending. This article insists that we understand welfare states as clusters of regime-types, and that their development must be explained interactively."

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