European differences: Typologies and classifications

The effort to classify countries in Europe and other advanced industrialised democ-racies along the lines of culture, institutional configurations, and policy outcomes is a recurring endeavour. Two accounts of country grouping have provoked aca-demic debate and were applied in various fields of comparative research. These are the ‘Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’ by Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) and the concept of ‘Families of Nations’ by Castles (1993).

Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) aimed to understand why distinct welfare logics and outcomes existed in industrialized countries. Drawing on historical accounts of different types of (working-)class mobilisation, social policy developments, and regime-institutionalisation, Esping-Andersen (1990) arrived at a typology of welfare regimes by applying dimensions of decommodification and social stratification (Arts and Gelissen 2002: 141) in 18 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation (OECD). Decommodification circumscribes the degree to which so-cial services are attainable independent of the recipients’ participation in and prior contributions to the market. Social stratification refers to the effect of the welfare

state on social structure: is the welfare state preserving existing status-hierarchies between different socioeconomic stratas, or does the welfare state contribute to a more egalitarian society?

Esping-Andersen (1990) arrived at the following, well-known classification of three welfare state types: on the one extreme there are liberal welfare states in which access to welfare benefits is closely tied to the market. Benefits only pro-vide the bare minimum needed to survive in order to to encourage labour-market participation by its citizens. The paradigm governing social policy is individualism:

individuals are primarily responsible for their own fate and redistribution of wealth is kept to a relative minimum. Typically English-speaking countries and Switzer-land fall into this category. In contrast, social democratic welfare regimes feature a high degree of decommodification of pension, sickness, and unemployment benefits.

Correspondingly, welfare entitlement is not contingent on prior contributions or any other market-based status. Lastly, conservative welfare regimes find themselves be-tween these two extremes. The state here acts under the premise of subsidiarity and only steps in when families are unable to support their members themselves. Values underlying social policy in conservative welfare states are influenced by a catholic religious background as well as corporatism. Countries in this group are situated in mainland and Southern Europe and comprise Spain, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, and Italy.

Esping-Andersen’s threefold classification of welfare regimes has provoked praise and critique, as well as follow-up studies with new and refined country classifications (for an overview see tables in Arts and Gelissen 2002: 143-144). The most frequent criticisms refer to the miss-allocation of the Antipodean countries to the liberal wel-fare regime cluster alongside the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the USA, as well as the neglect of a distinct Mediterranean country cluster (Arts and Gelissen 2002). Cross-validations with other studies which used alternative heuristics to clus-ter countries according to their social policy, however, arrive at the conclusion that in the majority of cases their groups correspond with Esping-Andersen’s three ideal types of liberal, conservative, and social-democratic welfare states (Arts and Gelis-sen 2002; Ebbinghaus 2012). However, these cross-validations also highlight that some countries are hybrid cases, switching between clusters depending on the sam-ple and policy indicators under investigation. Esping-Andersen’s original analysis was performed before the fall of the Iron Curtain which is why the post-communist Central and Eastern European countries are not considered in his classification.

While ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’ assesses countries on the basis of one policy area only, namely social policy, the volume of Castles (1993) develops the notion of distinct ‘Families of Nations’ through an analysis of 13 public policy

areas. Castles, too, aimed to explain policy coherence and dissonance among OECD member countries and to understand the idiosyncratic trajectory each group (family) of countries had taken in the decades following World Wars I and II. Castles saw commonalities in public policy outcomes as well as policy antecedents³²as rooted in an affinity owing to similar language, comparable culture and shared geographical location, as well as common historical experiences within groups of countries (Castles 1993: xiii; see also Obinger and Wagschal 2001; Castles and Obinger 2008.) While Castles’ work bears close resemblance to Esping-Adersen’s (1990, 1999) classification of countries, he arrives at four rather than three families of nations. These are the following: the (a) ‘English Speaking Family’ is comprised of the United Kingdom, its fellow Commonwealth members of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA, as well as Ireland. The (b) ‘Continental Family’ consists of countries located in Central-Western Europe but also includes Italy. The (c) ‘Scandinavian Family’ comprises Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Finally, Greece, Portugal, and Spain make up the (d) ‘Southern Family’ whose members suffered from autocratic rule well into the 1970s. Within these four families public policy outcomes (i.e. taxation, family policy, health care, etc.), policy antecedents, and legal origins are similar, while they significantly differ between families. A re-assessment of the families of nations concept after the Eastward expansion of the European Union in 2005 revealed the emergence of a new and post-communist family of nations and a convergence of the Southern Family towards the Continental Family (Castles and Obinger 2008).

Esping-Andersen’s (1990, 1999) research as well as Castles (1993) and many follow-up studies have concluded that ‘many potential sources of resemblance [be-tween countries] overlap to a greater or lesser degree’ (Castles and Obinger 2008:

324) and that current advanced democracies comprise three to four relatively ho-mogenous groups. These country classifications have helped inform the grouping of countries in regards to crime and justice, but also in regards to solidarity and social justice.

One widely recognized study which has embedded criminal policy clusters in a wider framework of political economy is the work of Cavadino and Dignan (2006a).

The authors consider whether penal policy, namely levels of imprisonment, are con-gruent with the classification of welfare states by Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999), and thus whether certain types of welfare regimes impact penal policies. Although the analysis shows that in 12 capitalist countries imprisonment rates vary roughly with the different welfare regimes, the categories are by no means discriminative. While the liberal welfare states display, on average, the highest imprisonment rates, and social-democratic countries the lowest, there are only marginal differences and

some-32Policy antecedents are the institutional and legal structure of a country.

times even overlaps between the rates of the different welfare types (Cavadino and Dignan 2006a: 447). For example the Netherlands, which is among the conservative corporatist countries, has a higher imprisonment rate than Australia, which is con-sidered to be a liberal state. Likewise, the range of values of the imprisonment rate within each welfare cluster all exceed the differences in imprisonment rates between clusters. Yet, they lend support to the notion that the underlying values of inclusion versus exclusion, for the most part, manifest themselves not only in welfare, but also in penal policies.

The rationale of in- and exclusion as dimensions for classifying countries was taken up by Hirtenlehner et al. (2012). The authors suggest that countries deal with social marginality either through exclusion, i.e. the use of imprisonment and other forms of penal control, or through inclusion through a strong and generous welfare state. A cluster analysis of European countries with a variety of indicators including welfare state characteristics, income inequality, individual punitive atti-tudes, fear of crime, social distrust, crime statistics, and penal regimes arrives at three groups of countries. Within these groups two extremes emerge. On the one hand there are highly decommodified countries in which fear of crime, individual punitive attitudes, and imprisonment rates are all on low levels. On the other hand there is a cluster of countries which are highly reliant upon penal regimes and only grant their citizens limited access to welfare benefits. The biggest group however consists of hybrid regimes (12 countries vs 5 and 6 countries respectively). Hirten-lehner et al’s (2012) cluster analysis only partly overlaps with the three ‘worlds of welfare.’ Similarly blurred lines among welfare clusters and clusters built from criminal justice indicators were found in other studies (cf Smit, Haen, and van Gam-meren 2008). Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon countries, and Western Europe do not appear to be inherently different when more criminal justice indicators than just the imprisonment rate are taken into account. Welfare regime studies, however, find these three regions to be distinct in their administration of social welfare.

Independent assessments of cultures of control as well as penal regimes have re-vealed that even though they each form four distinct clusters among European coun-tries both appear to be independent dimensions of a wider concept of punitiveness (Karstedt 2015a: 288). This cluster analysis did not take Esping-Andersen’s welfare types as the starting point but a heuristic close to the idea of families of nations.

Countries which are spatially or culturally near are more likely to influence each oth-ers’ penal and control policies and therefore will show similar outcomes: ‘cultural peers’ are the main drivers of the emergence of policy and attitude patterns among Europe. The study again finds a spatial distribution of cultures of control, which corresponds to the European regions of Scandinavia, Western Europe, Central- and

South Eastern transitional countries, as well as post-Soviet countries on the east-ern rim of Europe. Penal cultures, however, appear to only loosely overlap with European regions.

Interestingly, clusters of countries do not only form in relation to policy in mat-ters of criminal justice but also in regards to individual perceptions and attitudes concerning crime, punishment, and the work of the police as well as citizens’ victim-isation experiences (Norris 2009). The identified patterns almost perfectly overlap with the English and Nordic families of nations. Yet, the Continental and South-ern families of nations cannot be unambiguously reproduced by means of individual perceptions of crime and victimisation.

Are similar patterns and groups also found for solidarity? It appears that there are indeed distinct ‘cultures of solidarity’ within Europe, which are guided by dif-ferent underlying principles of inclusion, outreach, and concern for others (Karstedt 2014). Again these seem to follow geographical lines: in Central and Western Europe an individualistic but universal concept of solidarity governs individual attitudes and behaviour. Eastern Europe, in contrast, is dominated by collectivistic yet exclusion-ary forms of solidarity. This dividing line between East and West is also reflected in a respective divide in penal and control policies (Karstedt 2014: 106).

Dominant solidarity cultures are not only evident in individual attitudes, but also in welfare policies. Several studies have asked whether individual attitudes about solidarity, inclusion, and redistribution of wealth systematically vary with the welfare regime contexts individuals live in (Arts and Gelissen 2002; Gelissen 2000;

Gelissen and Arts 2001; Meier Jaeger 2006; Roosma, van Oorschot, and Gelissen 2014).³³ These find that in a majority of cases individual attitudes are shaped by the institutional structure of welfare regimes. Notions of solidarity and support for the welfare state vary between countries and are contingent on values of solidarity and inclusion represented by the welfare state regime (Gelissen 2000; Gelissen and Arts 2001; Roosma, van Oorschot, and Gelissen 2014; Meier Jaeger 2006).³⁴