How to Analyze Welfare States and their Development?

This chapter discusses three broad categories of approaches: quantitative, qualitative comparative and single case studies, focuses on the most important methods available and illustrates these with one or two examples. It indicates that which approach is "best" depends on the researcher's research question and goal. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the typical study of welfare state development–at that time focusing mostly on the welfare state's expansion–used aggregate expenditure data to assess this development. Ever since the development of welfare states became a research topic for scholars, quantitative analyses have been conducted. The sophistication of these analyses increased substantially over time. Since the mid-1990s, many welfare state scholars, as well as political scientists more generally, turned to pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis as their preferred quantitative approach. When a researcher wants to get an in-depth understanding of how a process of welfare state development evolved in a particular country, a single case study would be the appropriate choice.