and Wood’s book explores the way in which Latin American regimes have shifted from being rudimentary conservative ones (within the Esping-Andersen ‘family’ of regimes) to liberal ones. Among these countries it is possible to see choices being made between these options, most notably in Chile, which has had a special role in shaping the global pensions debate. Chile has experienced oscillations in this respect, with the period of Pinochet’s dictatorship enabling North American neoliberal economists to make the country a testing ground for free market theories. The important point in considering both Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, is the extent to which it is possible to talk of states making choices between regime models. These choices are not ‘free’ in the sense that they are constrained by countries’ positions in relation to parameters of global politics and global markets. The contemporary evolution of welfare states illustrates clearly the problems of using regime theory linked to the development of mature welfare states to predict current policy decisions (see Chapter 4 for further discussion).
In recognition of this problem, Gough and Wood’s (2004) work offers suggestions on how regime theory may be extended, and their concerns with the interconnectedness of systems, both through multi-national economic activities and with flows of remittances and international aid. They thus offer a new perspective on comparative analysis and tools for those who want to pursue these lines of enquiry. Yet still, their analysis does not extend to China or India or most of the Islamic world. All the analysis in this section leaves no unequivocal case for a new regime type outside the Esping-Andersen model, despite a more widely argued additional world embracing Southern Europe with perhaps parts of South East Asia and Latin America. Beyond this it may be questioned whether other efforts to stretch the use of regime modelling go too far, merely noting vestiges of the welfare approaches characteristic of Western Europe, or simply their absence.
While the roots of regime theory lie in a concern to delineate differences in the politics of welfare, modern usages focus much more on the extent to which it is possible to characterize as opposed to explain social policy systems, with the implication that the issues about explanatory power are now more concerned with explaining responses to new developments rather than origins. The original concern with the politics of welfare remains significant nevertheless. The extent to which particular welfare arrangements have political support from coalitions that protect them has been explored (Pierson, 1994, 2001) and related approaches that stress the importance of institutional pathways, in shaping change where welfare states have come under attack (Taylor-Gooby, 2001, 2002; and further discussion of this approach in Chapter 4). These ideas have had particular resonance since the late 2010s when both established and emerging state commitments to welfare have never been more fragile.
Since much of the contemporary controversy about welfare policies concerns the applicability of strongly market-oriented approaches, there may be a case for a simpler regime categorization system. It is often easier to draw a line between the liberal systems and the rest, than between the social democratic and the conservative regimes. The advocates of the social democratic approach are in many respects marginalized in the post-2008 world, and although the dissemination of models of social policy is occurring, the battle lines are in effect between the liberal and the conservative approaches.
This alternative way of considering social policy systems has much in common with Hall and Soskice’s (2001) classification of varieties of capitalism. They distinguish between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, where they argue (2001, p. 8) that in the former,
firms coordinate their activities primarily via hierarchies and competitive market arrangements. … Market relationships are characterized by the arm’s-length exchange of goods or services in a context of competition and formal contracting. In response to the price signals generated by such markets, the actors adjust their willingness to supply and demand goods or services, often on the basis of the marginal calculations stressed by neoclassical economics.
In the ‘coordinated market economies’, by contrast,
firms depend more heavily on non-market relationships to coordinate their endeavours with other actors and to construct their core competencies. These non-market modes of coordination generally entail more extensive relational or incomplete contracting, network monitoring based on the exchange of private information inside networks, and more reliance on collaborative, as opposed to competitive, relationships to build the competencies of the firm … economies are more often the result of strategic interaction among firms and other actors.
In these latter countries, the state is crucially a more active partner, linking with a range of interest groups (in the way described in Esping-Andersen’s categorization of the conservative regime).
In an analysis which examines both theoretically and empirically the varieties of capitalism and the typologies of the welfare regime approach, Schröder (2009) concludes that countries nest within a scheme of difference that becomes more complex as more factors are included in comparison. Thus, rather than competing to provide a single explanation of difference between countries, the range of typologies established by different authors offers a more ‘fine-grained’ picture of variation among states that diverge on the key axis of difference – the liberal economic model or its absence (see Schmidt, 2009, for example, who writes of ‘state influenced market economies’). As in the elaborations of specifications of Esping-Andersen’s conservative regime, the ‘non-liberal’ countries in the Mediterranean and Asian regions are regularly found to be different from continental Europe. An analysis by Lallement (2011) sees this difference as important for understanding the responses to the 2008 economic crisis, where being ‘liberal’ has been shown to have significant purchase on both the form and extent of policy reform. In a similar vein, Hay and Wincott’s (2012) post-crisis assessment of European countries also finds that beyond the liberal/non-liberal division, what emerges are clusters of similar countries rather than ‘worlds’ with hard boundaries. More importantly for social policy, however, is their argument that whether countries compete in the global market on the basis of ‘cost’ (cheap labour, cheap exports and so on) or ‘quality’ (high-level skills, high-end manufacturing) determines their welfare commitment.
What Hay and Wincott’s (2012) work reveals for advanced European economies (which also has resonance for the rest of the world) is that although convergence towards a liberal economic model is neither evident nor certain, within the operation of global capitalism the space for national idiosyncrasies of welfare arrangement is perceived by governments to be far more limited than it was in the period following the Second World War.
Some of the limitations of the welfare regime approach in dealing with social policy developments not located in advanced economies have already been explored. But it is also a feature of contemporary social policy making, particularly relevant for countries with economies that are developing and/or emerging, that key areas of regulation traditionally associated with the emergence of social provisions such as trade and labour are increasingly bound by agreements and legal frameworks that operate at the global, or at least international level. This is most obvious and well documented in relation to the European Union, but other IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, ILO and World Trade Organization play an increasingly important role in shaping the parameters of social policy, particularly in countries where the political-administrative architecture is less established or unstable. Chapter 4 recognizes these issues as a challenge that needs to be resolved in building on regime-related explanations of the development of welfare arrangements.
This chapter started by noting diversity as summarized by comparative expenditure statistics, and went on to show that early efforts at comparative generalization gave rather more attention to common trends than to diversity. The theoretical work that really marks the shift away from that approach is Esping-Andersen’s