ABSTRACT
As noted in a number of chapters in this book, recent debates about liberal welfare states owe a great deal to the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen, and in particular to his Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), which drew upon social theory and empirical analysis to identify three welfare regimes: a social democratic or Scandinavian model (see Chapter 12), a conservative or continental model (see Chapter 13), and what he termed a liberal or Anglo-Saxon model, which is the concern of this chapter. He argued that these regimes arose owing to particular historical and cultural conditions, so that each state is broadly oriented in a particular direction, reflecting decommodification (the extent to which an individual’s welfare is reliant upon the market), levels of social stratification (concerned with the role of welfare states in maintaining or breaking down social stratification), and the private-public mix in welfare provision (the relative roles of state, family and the market).
