Bolderson, H. and Mabbett, Deborah (1995) Mongrels or thoroughbreds: a cross-national look at social security systems. European Journal of Political Research 28 (1), pp. 119-139. ISSN 0304-4130.
Abstract
This paper reviews the methodological issues raised by different commentators' attempts to categorise countries' social security systems into ‘regime types’ or ‘models’. It is argued that there are two major problems with these categorisations: (1) the difficulty of finding empirical counterparts to the theoretical concepts used; (2) the complexity of actual social security systems, arising in particular from the diversity of benefits within each system. Despite these problems, we argue that it is possible to maintain a theoretically-informed approach to the comparative analysis of social security, by adopting a more flexible methodology. The approach presented in this paper identifies some of the main principles on which social security systems are based, specifies their empirical counterparts, and allows each national system to be analysed in terms of its particular conjunction or combination of principles.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Nov 2017 15:45 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:36 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/20228 |
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