Do Capitalist Welfare States Still Consist of ”The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?” Revisiting Esping-Andersen’s “Three Worlds” Studying Welfare Regimes of the 21st Century.

Abstract: This thesis aims to reproduce the study Esping-Andersen conducted in the seminal work “The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism” (1990) in a 21st century context. The study conducted in “Three Worlds” discovered that welfare states tended to cluster around three welfare-state regimes: social democratic, conservative and liberal. The purpose is to see whether the studied countries have changed during the first decade of the new millennium and whether the three-folded typology is still valid. The study conducted departs from the theoretical concepts de-commodification and stratification, which according to Esping-Andersen, defines a welfare-state regime. The concepts are studied in a quantitative comparative analysis of eighteen OECD countries, of the years 2000 and 2010 to see whether there are any changes during the 21st century. The study discovers that there are still evidence of a clustering around the three ideal-types social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare-state regimes. In comparison to Esping-Andersen’s study, there is even a greater coherence between the concepts de-commodification and stratification, where more countries in 2000 adheres to the same typology on both axis than in the original study, and even more in 2010.