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Article contents

Welfare state research and comparative political economy.

  • Silja Häusermann Silja Häusermann Department of Political Science, University of Zurich
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.654
  • Published online: 25 June 2018

Which risks are social and which are private? How much of their GDP do states spend on social welfare? Who exactly is entitled to which benefits? Is it still possible to finance an encompassing welfare state in times of deindustrialization, technological and demographic change, and globalization? And why do the answers to these questions differ so much across countries? These and similar questions—all central to social cohesion in capitalist democracies—ensure that the analysis of welfare politics is one of the theoretically as well as methodologically most dynamic and richest research areas within comparative political economy and political science more generally. Besides outlining the comparative development and the difficulty of measuring social policy, the focus of this contribution lies in a critical review of the most important past and current theoretical debates in the field of welfare state research, as a subfield of comparative political economy. These debates include party- and power-resource-centered approaches and their critiques, institutional explanations of welfare state retrenchment and restructuring, and the importance of multidimensional distributional effects for the analysis of social policy. The article concludes with a review of three more recent debates: the importance of public opinion and individual preferences for the development of the welfare state, the interaction of social policy and the changes of party systems, and the increasing relevance of social investment policies. The political and scientific need for innovative political science research will continue for the foreseeable future: Theory building and methodological possibilities are developing quickly, and the welfare states as research subject are constantly being challenged.

  • welfare states
  • social policy
  • social insurance systems
  • social risks
  • redistribution
  • partisan theory
  • power resource theory
  • regime theory
  • institutionalism
  • new politics
  • path dependency
  • party competition
  • social investment policy

Introduction

Welfare state research is one of the pivotal fields of policy analysis and comparative political economy. And even though scholars have researched the determinants, actors, institutions, decision making procedures and the effects of social policy for over 40 years, this research area remains until today one of the theoretically as well as methodologically most dynamic and rich research areas: The political science analyses of the determinants of policymaking directly relate to sociological and economic analyses of its effects. Moreover, qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze social policy within political science are well developed and mutually recognized. This theoretical and methodological pluralism characterizes the area of welfare state analysis (Pierson 2000 ) and offers a fertile ground for cumulative and innovative research.

There are three reasons for the intense and incessant interest in the analysis of welfare state politics: The first is the sheer importance of social policy for the state budget. Since 1960 , the social expenditures in the Western OCED countries—i.e. the public and mandatory private social spending (excluding education) as a share of GDP—rose from below 15 to between 20 and 30 percent. Figure 1 shows growing social spending over time (comparable OECD data are available only from 1980 onward) as well as a substantial variation across countries (for clarity, the figure combines the expenditures from different countries according to their welfare state profile, see below).

Figure 1. Social expenditures as share of GDP.

When compared according to its importance in the government’s budget, social spending is no less impressive: today, the Western OECD countries spend about 45 to 60 percent of their entire expenditures on social policy.

Besides the importance of social policy for the state budget, its immense and immediate importance for the distribution of life chances and life risks is the second reason for the high and continued interest in social policy within political science. Within this context lies also the third reason: this policy field essentially exemplifies the power of politics to shape society. Despite similar economic and demographic challenges, different countries have always responded to them in very diverse ways (see Schmidt 2005 : 199ff for a useful overview of the development of differences, and their explanations). There is a basic consensus in comparative welfare state research (i.e. within political science, the discipline this article focuses on 1 ) that political actors, power relations, and institutions are the determining factors of the design and generosity of social policy. In other words, social policy is not “functional,” i.e. not the direct result of “objective” economic, social or demographic problems, even though these factors constitute, of course, the backdrop of the political process. Social policy is to a much larger extent the result of genuinely political decisions, which bring about direct and far-reaching consequences for the people whose life chances they affect. Therefore, the importance of politics is what makes social policy such an important research subject beyond the field of welfare state research only. Some of the key approaches of public policy research were developed mainly within the field of social policy, such as power resource theory, the theory of path dependency, and—to a lesser extent—partisan theory and varieties of capitalism.

The next section “ The Development of Welfare States ” will provide an overview of the most important areas of social policy and of the development of welfare states across time and countries. The second part of the chapter addresses the field’s current state of research, by laying out the temporal and analytical development of the most important theoretical approaches of social policy, focusing particularly on recent debates.

Given the complexity and vastness of the research field, this article cannot provide an exhaustive account of the political-science insights and approaches in social policy. Hence, the focus of this chapter is restricted to political science in disciplinary terms, and the geographic focus is on Western OECD countries. Although the welfare state literature in the younger democracies is growing quickly, theory building is concentrated mostly on the advanced capitalist democracies. For the same reason, the article emphasizes the contributions of comparative welfare state research and largely omits country-specific findings.

The Development of Welfare States

Social policy intervenes in society and the economy both to redistribute material resources between classes and to safeguard against social risks. It does so by regulating the economy, redistributing material goods, or providing state support services. Social policy covers a broad repertoire of instruments, of which the distribution and redistribution of material goods—by means of taxes and transfers—constitutes the core. Regulation (such as work safety, minimum wages, or employment protection) and state services (such as child care, healthcare, and unemployment counseling services) are also a standard part of social policy. 2

The most important element of this definition is, however, that social policy distributes and redistributes resources in order to insure against “social risks.” 3 The choice of risks to be included in the canon of social risks is a political decision. Countries have, at different times, addressed this choice in their own way. Whether parenthood as a reason of income loss, for instance, is a social (versus a private) risk, justifying and demanding a targeted intervention by the state, is in many countries disputed. Countries like Germany or Sweden maintain generous support for parental leave. They replace the income losses of mothers and fathers for several months or even several years and guarantee their employment positions. Other countries, like the United States or Switzerland, however, grant merely a few weeks of maternity protection.

There are, however, a number of traditional risks that have become essential for most welfare states: old age, sickness, accident, disability, unemployment, and (at least in most countries) motherhood. When these risks materialize, people can no longer earn their livelihood or that of their family in the labor market. There are also risks that come from supporting dependent family members (child benefits, widower pensions, etc.). Scholars argue that these are the typical income-loss risks of the industrial age (Bonoli, 2005 ; Taylor-Gooby, 2005 )—typical because they focus on the needs of the male industrial worker, as the family’s breadwinner.

The changes of family structures and of labor markets since the 1970s have placed, according to these authors, a number of additional social risks on the agenda of most modern welfare states. These new risks include, in particular, not being able to work because of care-taking duties or skills obsolete in the labor market (long-term unemployment). The state can, in turn, respond to these risks with reintegration measures and child-care services. These risks are “new” particularly due to their pervasiveness and political salience in the post-industrial era.

Even though the traditional risks, which social policies protect against, resemble each other in the most developed welfare states, these countries’ specific designs of social policies differ greatly. A comprehensive description of these differences across countries and time is beyond the scope of this article; the discussion here is restricted to the main features of the welfare state and the most common indicators that allow an overall comparison.

There are differences between welfare states, concerning on the one hand the size and generosity of specific social policies and on the other hand their institutional design and underlying logic. On a very general level, it is possible to divide the developed welfare states into clusters along two dimensions (according to Bonoli, 1997 , based on Esping-Andersen, 1990 ). Regarding the benefit level, welfare states can be either generous or residual. Concerning the distributional logic, they differ by the degree of redistribution: the benefit level can be egalitarian or stratifying. In an egalitarian system, the range between minimal and maximal benefit is relatively small (redistribution principle), while in a stratifying system, it is large. This larger range (or the inequality in the benefit level) results from the fact that the benefits are apportioned proportionally to the paid social contributions (insurance principle). 4

From these two dimensions—generosity and distributional logic—roughly four types of welfare states result:

Egalitarian-universalist welfare states, which combine comprehensive benefits with substantial vertical redistribution, are located mostly in Scandinavia.

Generous insurance systems, which offer comprehensive benefits but which stratify them according to contributions and employment, characterize the welfare states of continental Europe. Both Anglo-Saxon and South European countries typically have smaller welfare states.

In Europe’s southern countries, the welfare states are structured especially according to the insurance principle.

The Anglo-Saxon countries are more egalitarian and more redistributive in their benefit structure, but always at a very low level.

This rough classification does not, of course, do justice to the complexity of country variation and the development of the welfare states over time. In particular, the extensive reform efforts during the recent decades have intensified the tendency toward hybrid welfare states (e.g., Palier, 2010 ).

The Difficulty of Measuring Social Policy

The complexity of concrete, real-world social policies generally requires country-specific, qualitative case studies to do justice to their various dimensions of benefit levels, coverage, entitlement requirements, and governance structures. Comparative welfare state research necessarily operates at a higher level of abstraction in order to make social policies comparable across sectors and countries. The selection of comparable data when measuring social policies—or their change due to reforms—is one of this field’s largest and most debated challenges. This issue concerns the conceptualization of the policy issues to be measured as well as their actual measurement (see Clasen & Siegel, 2007 on the specific topic of “the dependent variable problem”).

Comparative welfare state research draws mostly on two types of data: statistics on public expenditures on social policies, and statistics on the level and coverage of individual social policy programs. Both types have their distinct problems, which will be presented in a short overview in this section. Data on public expenditures in different policy fields are available for long time periods and for a wide range of countries, especially in the form of OECD data tables and specialized data sets from comparative welfare state research (e.g., Armingeon et al., 2013 ). Many—especially early—studies tried to explain aggregate public spending as a measure of a welfare state’s size and, ultimately, its generosity. The indisputable advantages of these public expenditure data are their immediate budgetary relevance, their political visibility, and their extensive availability. They suffer, however, from a number of shortcomings. De Deken and Kittel ( 2007 ) emphasize that their comparability is limited because they are based upon complex and sometimes nontransparent definitions of public versus private expenditures. In addition, changes in social policy programs often appear only several years later in the actual public budgets, which is why public expenditures reflect reforms in an insufficient manner. In a similarly critical vain, Siegel ( 2007 ) points out the problem that public expenditures are usually set in relation to gross domestic product, which means that variations in the business cycle cause the figures to fluctuate even in the absence of any policy change. Public expenditures in any given field also depend on demand, that is, the extent of the problem the policies address. Expenditures on unemployment programs, for instance, can rise in economically fraught times without any increase in the program’s generosity. Figure 2 shows public expenditures on unemployment benefits as a share of GDP in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Figure 2. Public expenditures for unemployment benefits as a share of GDP.

Figure 2 shows that the expenditures were highest in Spain over the entire time period, while they generally fell in Great Britain and rose in Germany and Sweden during the 1990s. Since then, they have remained in Germany—in contrast to Sweden—at a relatively high level (perhaps due to structural reasons such as reunification or deindustrialization). Two problems of expenditure data become immediately apparent in Figure 2 . First, the expenditures reflect not only the cyclical fluctuations of the unemployment rate but also of GDP. Second, the data remain silent about how many people were entitled to unemployment benefits, for how long, and under which conditions. In other words, expenditure data reflect only the budgetary, aggregate part of a social policy’s generosity but not the eligibility criteria or the distribution rules. Expenditure data are thus problematic for the policy areas in which these two dimensions vary greatly (e.g., unemployment or pension insurance). For institutionally more homogenous areas, like education or healthcare, these data do contain useful information about a welfare state’s generosity (Jensen, 2011 ).

The main problems of expenditure data are that they do not directly reflect political decisions and that they insufficiently represent the institutional design of several social policies. For a long time, research could only solve these issues by resorting to qualitative case studies. Over time, however, comprehensive quantitative data sets on benefit levels and coverage of social policies have become available (see Scruggs et al., 2014 or Korpi & Palme, 2007 ). These data sets provide comparative codings of coverage rates and income replacement rates of the most important social policies. The income replacement rate is a measurement of the generosity of an instrument, which relates the level of benefits to the average wage of a typical employee. These data allow the effects of specific political decisions as well as the extent of the distribution principle to be measured. Since the emergence of these data, purely expenditure-focused studies have receded into the background. The income replacement rates, however, are not without problems. On the one hand, it is difficult to determine unambiguously the income replacement rate due to the calculation complexity concerning reference income, taxation of the benefits, benefit duration, and public benefit level. These difficulties pose fundamental problems concerning the validity of the data (Wenzelburger at al., 2013 ; Scruggs, 2013 ). On the other hand, the replacement rates suffer from a conceptual shortcoming because they necessarily refer to specific exemplary cases, for example a single worker, or a married worker with two children, whose spouse is not gainfully employed. Additionally, all cases presuppose a complete employment history, and the benefits are calculated for one specific benefit period. These case-specific assumptions imply that the generosity for other social groups (e.g., people with an interrupted employment history or the long-term unemployed) is not reflected in the measure.

Figure 3 illustrates these difficulties. It shows the replacement rates of the public unemployment insurance schemes in the same four countries as in the previous figure. As in Figure 2 , Spain offers the highest rates and Great Britain the lowest. We also see, however, that the income replacement rates do not depend on the business cycle. This is a clear advantage of these data.

Figure 3. Income replacement rate of public unemployment insurance. Note: Income replacement rates for a 40-year-old industrial worker with 20 years of work history, no family, and based on the benefit level of the first six months after loss of employment.

On the other hand, the very steady line for Germany shows that the income replacement rates (depending on the exact definition) do not reflect important policy reforms. In 2004 , the government implemented drastic cutbacks in the unemployment insurance scheme with the Hartz IV reforms. After only a year of contribution-based unemployment support, the benefits decreased to the level of social assistance. This reform does not appear in Figure 3 because the replacement rates refer only to the benefit level during the first six months of unemployment.

Overall, it is safe to say that the advent of data on the institutional design of social policies was an important conceptual and empirical advancement in the analysis of social policy. It does not, however, absolve researchers from analyzing carefully the adequacy of these data to measure generosity. Ultimately, it is only possible to evaluate the validity of a measurement in relation to the specific research question.

Current State of Research: What Determines the Emergence of, the Stabilization of, and the Change in Social Policy?

This section first discusses the explanations for the expansion of the modern welfare states in the postwar period of the 20th century . Subsequently, it describes two institutional equilibrium theories of the 1990s and early 2000s; both theories categorized the modern welfare states that had emerged from postwar growth and aimed to explain the stability of social policies and how they function. The third subsection expounds the key contributions on the change in welfare states in the era of slowing economic growth and austerity. The final subsection sheds light on three more recent theoretical debates on social policy. This order roughly mirrors the sequence of theory development, from the first to the most recent theoretical contributions. It is important to note, however, that the early approaches, which were devised originally in the context of welfare state expansion, continue to be relevant and are constantly being further developed. Today, the different theoretical strands are engaged in an active dialogue and in constant competition, which benefits the field of social policy research as a whole.

Early Approaches to Explain the Emergence and Expansion of Welfare States

The early approaches to explain the spectacular expansion of Western welfare states in the 1960s and 1970s were mostly functionalist; they assumed that coping with the consequences of the war and the progression of industrialization created social policy needs and demands as well as economic growth—and hence the ability to meet these demands (e.g., Titmus, 1958 ; Peacock & Wiseman, 1961 ; Wilensky, 1975 ; and the canonical Flora & Alber, 1981 ). According to this account, the rapidly expanding old-age, accident, widow, illness, and disability social security schemes were primarily a functional response to expanding risks in the context of the waning family unit and community solidarity, caused by industrialization. These explanations of the sociopolitical process remained largely blind to the differences across countries, political actors, and power relations.

The party-centered theories of the 1970s should be regarded mainly as political science’s first genuinely political response to this early functionalism. Two approaches are particularly important: partisan theory and power resource theory. Partisan theory argued that the ideological orientation of parties and governments shapes the generosity of social security programs. Both early and later contributions along this line of reasoning addressed primarily the explanation of public expenditures in different areas of social policy (Castles & McKinlay, 1979 and Hewitt, 1977 are examples of early contributions; more recent contributions include Schmidt, 1997 ; Castles, 2009 ; and Zohlnhöfer et al., 2013 ).

Within partisan theory, what constitutes the basis for the ideological orientation of parties remains controversial. The power resource approach had from the start a narrower theoretical focus (e.g., Stephens, 1979 ; Korpi, 1983 ; and Esping-Andersen, 1985 as examples of early contributions and Korpi & Palme, 2003 ; Allan & Scruggs, 2004 ; Bradley et al., 2003 ; Huber & Stephens, 2001 as later ones). This approach conceptualizes social policy as the actual power resource in the class conflict between labor and capital. This means that social benefits are the goal of labor mobilization, because they reduce workers’ dependency on the commodification of their labor power (what Esping-Andersen, 1990 called “decommodification”). On the other hand, it means that social policy achievements are themselves resources for the mobilization and politicization of the “democratic class struggle,” that is, the conflict in the parliamentary arena between social-democratic labor parties and the parties representing the interests of capital. The radically new—and provocative—element of power resource theory was its obvious root in Marxist class analysis, combined, however, with a steadfast faith in and commitment to nonrevolutionary parliamentarian-democratic distributional politics. It brought the powerful proposition that the welfare state could be an effective instrument to overcome capitalism democratically.

Despite these differences in their theoretical foundations, partisan theory and power resource theory agree on a key hypothesis: the stronger the position of social-democratic parties in parliament and the government, the more generous the design of social policy. In the case of the power resource theory, this linear hypothesis was complemented by contributions that pointed out the importance of specific distributional coalitions. Esping-Andersen ( 1985 ) emphasized, for instance, the alliance between social-democratic and agrarian interests for the creation of the Nordic welfare state model, and Van Kersbergen ( 1995 ) added to this approach a theory on the influence of Christian Democracy regarding the structure of continental European welfare states. These contributions provided a nuanced picture not only of the size but also of the structure of these welfare states: universalistic-egalitarian in the North, stratified in Europe’s center. 5

Besides the functionalist and party-centered approaches to explaining the expansion of social policy schemes, a third important line of research in this early phase of social-policy research is institutionalist theories. Early institution-based contributions argued that similar structural trends may generate different social-policy responses depending on the degree of institutional decentralization and the autonomy of the state (Heclo, 1974 ; Orloff & Skocpol, 1984 ; Skocpol, 1992 ). In reaction to power resource theory, scholars devised arguments that conceptualized the effects of power configurations to be conditional on institutional veto points (Immergut, 1992 ; Huber, Ragin, & Stephens, 1993 ; Bonoli, 2000 ). These arguments did not refute the basic hypotheses of party-centered theories, but added another variable: veto points open up the system, divide power, and require compromise. Thereby, they moderate the influence of partisan governmental power.

Welfare State Typologies: Two Versions of Regime Theory

The early theories of the emergence and formation of the modern welfare states were followed—consequentially—by literature that categorized the outcome of this formation. The resulting typologies, developed in the early 1990s and the early 2000s, became immensely important for the field of social policy, especially in the form of regime theories . Regime theories are equilibrium theories, because they identify an interdependent and self-stabilizing network of institutions. They are heuristic instruments that postulate a number of ideal-typical configurations, to which real-world social policies can be compared. In welfare state research, two regime theories are particularly important: the “worlds of welfare capitalism” (Esping-Andersen, 1990 ) and the “varieties of capitalism” (Hall & Soskice, 2001 ).

Esping-Andersen’s ( 1990 ) conceptualization of three “worlds” of social policy, which differ according to their politico-ideological origins and the resulting institutional peculiarities, can justifiably be called the single most important and most cited contribution of social policy research. Based on the power resource theory, Esping-Andersen argues that the Western welfare states differ systematically along two dimensions: the workers’ degree of independence from the labor market as a source of subsistence (“decommodification”) and the degree of social inequality that social policy either creates or mitigates (“stratification”). The social democratic welfare states of Northern Europe feature a generous, universalistic-egalitarian profile of social security schemes, while the liberal, Anglo-Saxon welfare states practice egalitarian, but only means-tested, poverty avoidance. And the continental, Christian democratic welfare states established generous, but strongly stratifying, social insurance systems. Each of the institutional configurations generates, according to Esping-Andersen, a specific political support coalition that stabilizes the configuration in place.

The theory of the “three worlds” was used in countless contributions, was criticized, and was further developed. 6 Only two objections turned out to be theoretically important and consequential. First, scholars showed that the Southern European welfare states, characterized by low benefit levels and clientelistic practices, need to be distinguished analytically from the other types (Ferrera, 1996 ; Bonoli, 1997 ; Manow, 2013 ). Second, the feminist critique of Esping-Andersen pointed out the necessity to expand the perspective to other policies; authors like Ann Shola Orloff ( 1993 ) and Jane Lewis ( 1993 ) argued that Esping-Andersen’s focus on wage replacement and its decommodifying effects fails to address the life chances of women. Defamilization is—especially for women—at least as important as decommodification, because it accounts for gender-specific dependencies. Subsequently, scholars paid more attention to family policies, and Esping-Andersen ( 1999 ) himself acknowledged the critique by extending his typology in a follow-up study. Today, several studies emphasize the tendency toward hybrid forms of welfare states (e.g., Palier, 2010 ) that could increasingly blur the differences between the three worlds. These adjustment processes occur, however, in a severely institutionally constrained way, which stabilizes regime differences (Beramendi et al., 2015 ).

At the beginning of the 2000s, another regime theory emerged that attracted extensive attention in welfare state research—the “varieties of capitalism” (Hall & Soskice, 2001 )—because it offered a different interpretation of the creation and role of social policies. The basic assumptions of this approach fundamentally contradict power resource theory: the key driver of social-policy development, according to this account, is not class conflict but the cross-class interests of workers and employers in the most productive firms and sectors of the economy (Mares, 2003 ). Producer group politics are thus this approach’s linchpin. Social policy is not seen as a decommodifying, redistributive instrument but as an institutional incentive structure for workers (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001 ). In the coordinated market economies of Northern and Continental Europe, the key industries require workers with firm- and industry-specific skills. But for individuals, it is rational to invest in these “specific skills” only if they are protected by generous state, sectoral, or firm-level social insurance schemes or by employment protection. In the liberal market economies of the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, producers need flexibility and workers with general skills. For this reason, social insurance is less important in these countries. Varieties of capitalism conceptualized social policies purely in insurance terms (as opposed to redistribution), and thereby sparked a strong and growing literature on insurance motives as drivers of social policy preferences, which became relevant and visible beyond the actual varieties of capitalism theory (Iversen & Soskice, 2001 ; Rehm, 2011 ; Rehm et al., 2012 ). Also in contrast to power resource theory, which underlies Esping-Andersen’s regime theory, the theory of liberal versus coordinated market economies pursues an individualistic, rationalist, and largely functionalist approach. Social policy is an instrument of successful economic policy and not one of distributional compensation; varieties of capitalism focuses on efficiency instead of distributional policy, and on insurance instead of redistribution.

The debate between the two approaches is not yet resolved and takes place mostly in the field of historical, qualitative research, because their main difference lies in the role of capital for the historical introduction of major social insurance systems (cf. Mares, 2003 or Swenson, 2001 vs. Korpi, 2006 and Paster, 2011 ). It is difficult to deny that varieties of capitalism can—at best—explain only parts of social policy (such as the most important social insurance programs). Large segments of the welfare state (e.g., social assistance) can hardly be explained without reference to distributive power struggles.

Explanations of the Retrenchment and the Restructuring of Welfare States

The three decades after World War II saw an extraordinarily high level of economic growth, and this growth fostered the expansion of social policy. Since the 1980s, the structural context of social policy has changed dramatically: slowing economic growth and deindustrialization, consequently increasing structural unemployment, demographic aging, and declining birth rates are merely the most important trends that strain social policy and welfare states. In the 1990s, the question emerged whether social policy could even still be funded or whether the globalization-related strengthening of capital interests would radically erode social policy programs (Kuhnle, 2000 ).

In this environment, Paul Pierson’s ( 1996 , 2001a ) “New Politics of the Welfare State” generated enormous resonance in political science. Pierson argued that social policy arrived in an “era of permanent austerity.” This austerity would not lead to a simple inversion of the power resources theory (i.e., to a strengthening of capital interests against labor interests and hence to the dismantling of social policy programs). Rather, the “mature welfare state” is, according to Pierson, institutionally and politically stabilized: the established social policies lead to a quasi-automatic growth of the welfare state, because the demographic and structural transformations make expenditures grow even in the absence of political reforms (Pierson, 2001b ). In addition, Pierson made the case that benefit cuts are politically unlikely, because the welfare state creates its own support through power asymmetries, path dependencies, and policy feedbacks. Because larger and larger parts of the population have earned claims on the welfare state through paid contributions (and have become “stakeholders”), its support has grown far beyond the confines of the social democratic electorate. No political party would dare to cut benefits, lest it be punished in the next election.

The evidence for this stability thesis is empirically disputed (Green-Pedersen, 2004 ; Starke, 2006 ). In particular, the proponents of power resource theory disagreed with Pierson and criticized his choice of dependent variable. While Pierson shows the stability mainly using expenditure data, they provided analyses that demonstrated the restraining effect of right-wing, conservative governments—even in recent years—on actual benefit levels (Korpi & Palme, 2003 ; Allan & Scruggs, 2004 ; Pontusson & Weisstanner, 2018 ) and public employment (Clayton & Pontusson, 1998 ). More recent contributions have suggested a useful distinction between policy areas that can explain the institutional conditions under which partisan politics remain effective or, respectively, undercut. Jensen ( 2012 ) and Zohlnhöfer et al. ( 2013 ) argue that social insurance schemes that target life-course risks and reach large parts of the population—especially the old-age provision—are indeed stabilized by institutional and electoral mechanisms, as Pierson asserts. In these policy fields, partisan differences in policymaking shrink. The fields that entail more redistribution between social classes (because risks are concentrated and benefits accrue mainly to the less privileged, especially unemployment benefits) continue to exhibit ideological partisan differences.

Pierson’s New Politics thesis may hold empirically only in the presence of certain conditions. His contribution to social policy research, however, extends much further. The most important consequence of Pierson’s argument for research on the transformation of the welfare state was steering theoretical attention away from blunt benefit levels towards the institutional design of social policies and its consequences for political dynamics. The key insight of social policy research in the last two decades was essentially a very old one: as Lowi ( 1972 ) already noted, policy shapes politics. The political conflict over reforming a policy—against the background of the existing policy—is not the same as the one over introducing a new policy.

From this insight, two strands of literature emerged that explain the recent transformation of social policy from a new, more institutionalist perspective. One growing body of literature concerns “endogenous” distributional effects . It examines how a policy’s distributional effects change over time due to an accumulation of marginal policy reforms (Streeck & Thelen, 2005 ) or even in the absence of any reform (Hacker, 2004 ). The underlying idea is that social policy benefits may be dismantled, for instance, by not adapting the policy to a changing situation (what Hacker, 2004 calls “drift”). The Literature on “dualization” offers another example: when fewer and fewer workers fulfill a social policy’s eligibility criteria (e.g., as a consequence of structurally growing atypical or marginal employment), the welfare state is selectively retrenched even if the benefit levels for the (shrinking) core workforce remain stable (Palier & Thelen, 2010 ; Emmenegger et al., 2012 ).

Besides these contributions, another strand of literature emerged that theorizes and examines the increasing multidimensionality of welfare politics. Precisely because the institutional distributional effects of social policy are so different, existing welfare states “create” differing stakeholder groups that may cross-cut traditional class conflicts. Giuliano Bonoli ( 2005 ) argues, for instance, that the interaction of industrial welfare states with post-industrial societal changes generates “new social risks,” whose opponents and supporters are not adequately captured by the simple labor-capital antagonism. Others contend, in a similar vein, that the left (social democracy and unions) needs to be reconceptualized with regard to the diverging sociopolitical interests of labor market insiders and outsiders (Rueda, 2005 ; Häusermann, 2010 ).

In this context, one can also note the emerging literature on migration and social policy, which points out that the generosity of social policy does not necessarily include the integration of migrants into social security systems (Sainsbury, 2012 ; Eugster, 2013 ). The explicit exclusion of immigrants to maintain the social-policy privileges of a nationally defined population is called welfare chauvinism. Hence, welfare chauvinism can also split the interests of labor.

The politically relevant groups in all of these contributions (new social risk bearers, labor market outsiders, migrants) are not—or are only insufficiently—taken into account by the existing welfare states because they were tailored historically and politically to the needs of the core industrial workforce. The interests of these groups do not necessarily converge with those of this core workforce and defy the simple left-right categorization that underlies partisan or power resource theory. These more recent approaches require therefore a more complex, multidimensional understanding of sociopolitical distributional conflicts. This multidimensionality of cleavages accounts for flexible and changing coalition patterns, which cannot be captured by the traditional partisan approaches (Bonoli & Natali, 2012 ; Häusermann, 2012 ; Beramendi et al., 2015 ).

Recent Debates and Approaches

Welfare state research is developing at least as dynamically as welfare states themselves. For that reason, it is useful to point out three current debates and trends in social policy research that have not yet been fully developed as distinct theoretical approaches, but that complement or challenge traditional approaches.

First, welfare state research has turned its attention more strongly to political economy approaches. A rise in micro-level centered research questions and explanations is the most visible consequence of this trend. It implies a stronger emphasis on individual-level research questions and designs. The research on the (institutional) determinants of people’s social policy attitudes and preferences is in fact not new (cf. Svallfors, 1997 ; Larsen, 2008 ). More recent studies, however, focus more on policy processes and “demand-driven” policy change, and less on attitudes themselves (e.g., Brooks & Manza, 2007 ; Gingrich & Ansell, 2012 ; Rehm, 2011 , 2016 ; Rehm et al., 2012 ; Häusermann et al., 2015 , 2016 ). This trend can be understood as the effort to provide a micro-foundation for the meso and macro theories of social policy development. This aim is all the more important as many traditional theories, like power resource and partisan theory, rest upon the aggregation of assumed, rather than empirically observed, interests.

This point leads to the second more recent and unresolved debate: the question of the explanatory power of classic party-political approaches of social policy (for an overview, see Häusermann et al., 2013 ). Partisan theory is one of social policy research’s most established approaches. Whether social democratic parties still implement more generous social policy reforms than conservative parties is disputed. But generally, we have seen the explanatory power of the “partisan color” of the government decline since the 1980s (Huber & Stephens, 2001 ; Zohlnhöfer et al., 2013 ). What most studies leave unanswered are the reasons for this waning explanatory power. In most cases, they put forward theoretical explanations like globalization constraints, financial pressure, or parties’ ideological convergence, thereby neglecting to a large extent the fact that parties and party systems have changed fundamentally in the last few decades. The emergence of right-wing populist parties, which mobilize mostly workers (Rydgren, 2012 ), and the transformation of social democracy into culturally liberal parties of the middle class (Kitschelt, 1994 ; Beramendi et al., 2015 ) have fundamentally altered the electoral base of traditionally “left” and “right” parties. This transformation has not only created a new dynamic of party competition (Kitschelt, 2001 ), but has also led to changes in parties’ social policy positions (Häusermann, 2010 ; Gingrich & Häusermann, 2015 ).

Finally, a substantive debate on social policy is becoming increasingly important. This debate—beyond the retrenchment or restructuring of existing social policy—is about the goals of social policy in a post-industrial society, because striving to protect income increasingly disregards the reality of eroding labor market security and family structures (Esping-Andersen, 2002 ). Recent contributions argue that social policy may (need to) transform into “social investment policy,” enabling people ex ante to find gainful employment instead of alleviating poverty ex post through transfers and compensating income loss. Key elements of such enabling and activating policies are investments in (early childhood, regular, and vocational) education, child care services for working parents, and activating labor market measures and training for job seekers (Morel et al., 2012 ; Hemerijck, 2013 ; Hemerijck, 2017 ). This debate on compensating versus activating social policy raises the fundamental question of the research subject and the central “dependent variables” of social-policy research, which can (still) only insufficiently be measured with the field’s usual data sources. The theory building on the politics of social investment policy is only in its infancy (Garritzmann et al., 2017 ).

Conclusion and Outlook

For decades, social policy—whether being expanded or cut back—has constantly been high on the political and political science agenda. The creation and expansion of comprehensive welfare states is one of the central democratic achievements of the 20th century and has led—with considerable variation across countries—to a drastic reduction in poverty risks due to sickness, old and young age, unemployment, or accident. In the last three decades, two contrasting trends have stood at the center of politics and research: on the one hand, the demand for the expansion of these welfare states to the new social risks of long-term unemployment, structural change, new family structures, and the compatibility of family and career; and on the other hand, the question of financial viability of welfare states, or rather the necessity of dismantling social benefits. This tension between intensified demands and limited resources is clearly apparent in the recent context of the “Great Recession.” More austerity or more investment? Does the crisis require more or less social policy? Or, more specifically, whose needs and risks are particularly being protected? During the crisis, these questions have become more acute and have gained particular visibility.

Social policy analysis can only provide an answer to these questions by analyzing the genuinely political factors that matter here: the interests of actors, power relations, and institutions. Their interaction determines how scarce resources are distributed—who wins and who loses. Not least with this level-headed analysis, social policy research contributes to a correct and necessary “de-romanticizing” of social policy: benefits are not given according to the level of distress to those most in need, but to those who prevail. Social policy is not identical to vertical redistribution, but to collectivization of selected risks in favor of some social groups and at the expense of others. In times of scarce resources, these processes of distributional politics increase in complexity because the rivalry between the needs of different groups is more intense. For this reason, one-dimensional left-right categorizations are often insufficient to capture the front lines of distributional politics. In other words, social policy is not only the battle between the poor and the rich. Unemployed youth, single mothers, employers with a shortage of skilled workers, industrial workers troubled with fear of social decline, women who work part-time, working parents with children, and pensioners all have their own specific demands for social policy. These pluralizing demands may even broaden political support for the welfare state. But the support also becomes more heterogeneous, more fragmented, and perhaps more precarious. Precisely because of this pluralization, social policy remains a particularly exhilarating, important, and fruitful field for the use, but also for the development, of policy analysis.

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1. There also is a literature in economics on the institutional and structural determinants of social spending, which mostly overlaps with structuralist approaches in political science.

2. It is controversial whether education policy should be included in the canon of social policy, and, as a result, its inclusion varies.

3. For a long time, social policy was understood in terms of its equalizing goal as redistributive effort. But redistribution has also always had the purpose of securing citizens income, that is, insuring them. However, while redistribution always has insurance functions, insurance is not necessarily redistributive. The distinction between the redistributive and insurance effects of social policy has therefore gained considerable attention in the past two decades of comparative political economy research, especially in the literature on “varieties of capitalism” (see section “ Welfare State Typologies: Two Versions of Regime Theory ”).

4. In addition to generosity and distributional logic, there are two further characteristics that distinguish social policy, but which are not as central to this contribution (e.g., Palier, 2010 ): the criteria for eligibility (universalist vs. contribution based vs. means tested) and the organization of social policy programs (state-run vs. corporatist vs. private).

5. Manow ( 2002 ) and Van Kersbergen and Manow ( 2009 ) developed the corresponding theory regarding the influence of religious and denominational movements on the design of social policy.

6. A number of replication studies focused on the methodological critiques of Esping-Andersen’s identification of the regimes by testing his typology with cluster and factor analyses. Depending on the choice of indicators, the results varied slightly. In particular, scholars found a considerable heterogeneity among the welfare states that were assigned to Christian democratic models (see Arts & Gelissen, 2002 for an overview of the replication studies and their results).

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Understanding the role of welfare state characteristics for health and inequalities – an analytical review

  • Kersti Bergqvist 1 ,
  • Monica Åberg Yngwe 1 &
  • Olle Lundberg 1 , 2  

BMC Public Health volume  13 , Article number:  1234 ( 2013 ) Cite this article

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The past decade has witnessed a growing body of research on welfare state characteristics and health inequalities but the picture is, despite this, inconsistent. We aim to review this research by focusing on theoretical and methodological differences between studies that at least in part may lead to these mixed findings.

Three reviews and relevant bibliographies were manually explored in order to find studies for the review. Related articles were searched for in PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Database searches were done in PubMed and Web of Science. The search period was restricted to 2005-01-01 to 2013-02-28. Fifty-four studies met the inclusion criteria.

Three main approaches to comparative welfare state research are identified; the Regime approach, the Institutional approach, and the Expenditure approach. The Regime approach is the most common and regardless of the empirical regime theory employed and the amendments made to these, results are diverse and contradictory. When stratifying studies according to other features, not much added clarity is achieved. The Institutional approach shows more consistent results; generous policies and benefits seem to be associated with health in a positive way for all people in a population, not only those who are directly affected or targeted. The Expenditure approach finds that social and health spending is associated with increased levels of health and smaller health inequalities in one way or another but the studies are few in numbers making it somewhat difficult to get coherent results.

Conclusions

Based on earlier reviews and our results we suggest that future research should focus less on welfare regimes and health inequalities and more on a multitude of different types of studies, including larger analyses of social spending and social rights in various policy areas and how these are linked to health in different social strata. But, we also need more detailed evaluation of specific programmes or interventions, as well as more qualitative analyses of the experiences of different types of policies among the people and families that need to draw on the collective resources.

Peer Review reports

In the area of health inequality research, as well as in the wider fields of social and public health sciences, there is an on-going and ever developing discussion on macro versus micro level explanations. The terminology used varies, but the core issue remains the same; what are the most important factors behind poor health and health inequalities, the upstream or downstream, distal or proximal, structural or individual ones? From an etiological or causal point of view, this duality can at least in part be resolved by building more complex models, where different levels of mechanisms are nested and organised sequentially. From a policy point of view, this sort of understanding is also important, but there is still the issue of where to find the best policy entry points.

Here the recent years’ work on social determinants have constituted an attempt to draw the attention of policy makers to the causes of the causes , in other words to the wider social circumstances in which people live their lives and that more or less indirectly affect their chances to be healthy and live long. The renewed interest in public health for more general conditions of life such as childhood and conditions of upbringing, education and training, work and economic resources has also led to a larger focus on the wider policy context. If we think that the causes of the causes are embedded in conditions of life more generally, then we also need to look for policy options wore widely. More concretely, this means that a broad range of policies and programmes dealing with and affecting education, work and incomes of people becomes of great interest also from a public health perspective.

These sets of policies are in turn often not combined randomly. On the contrary, a long and rich research tradition has studied how different welfare states vary systematically in the principles that have guided the design and execution of policies for poverty alleviation, to take but one example. In this tradition of ‘Welfare State Research' , one prominent question has been the driving force behind the growth of modern welfare states, while another key issue has been the consequences of different types of welfare state solutions in terms of e.g. poverty or fertility rates. With a growing interest in public health research for the wider policy context, it is quite natural that the past decade has witnessed a growing body of research on welfare states characteristics and health inequalities. The logic behind this is undisputable – if it can be argued that some types of welfare states are more successful in combating poverty and deliver a decent life to a larger share of the population there is reason to believe that improvements in the level and distribution of the ‘causes of the causes’ will also lead to better health and smaller inequalities.

However, while early comparative studies suggested that countries like Sweden had smaller inequalities than countries like Great Britain [ 1 ], larger and more systematic comparative studies have not been able to demonstrate clear differences in health inequalities that match traditional welfare state clusters [ 2 ]. In addition, some recent reviews of the field have found clearly mixed results [ 3 , 4 ].

The mixed findings provide a challenge for welfare state research and public health research alike, and even more so for policy making. If social determinants and ‘causes of the causes’ can be demonstrated to be important, why is it so hard to get consistent results when analysing welfare states and health inequalities? One possible answer to this important question may be that there are substantial theoretical and methodological differences between studies that at least in part lead to different findings. A fundamental issue is that there are several ways of analysing welfare states and health inequalities in comparative health research.

Dahl and van der Wel [ 5 ] describe three common approaches to characterise the welfare state; as regime types, as welfare institutions or as social spending. Comparative health research has been dominated by the ‘ Regime approach'  , in which classifications of countries based on various political elements are used. Those who support this approach have argued that certain countries cluster together in ‘welfare state regimes’ based on similar ideologies and policies or political traditions. One cluster of countries may, for example, support universal access to different services while another operates on the individual’s private responsibility to take care of and handle one’s own welfare, and that only the most poor qualify for social support. The general idea is that by specifying ideal types it is possible to assess the underlying commonalities and principles of social structures and welfare institutions [ 5 ]. In addition, the Regime approach comes in a variety of versions that differ both in terms of theoretical and empirical foundations and the countries included. By design, these ideal types will not fit the complex reality perfectly and might therefore give a rather crude result. Hence, this approach might be less useful in capturing mechanisms that generate inequalities in health. To complement the picture it may be important to also look at characteristics of social, health and labour market policy [ 5 ].

Another common approach is the ‘ Institutional approach ' , which focuses more on how welfare institutions and specific social policies and programmes are designed and how these translate into population health. The Institutional approach addresses the characteristics of policy programmes for, for example, pensions, sickness pay, unemployment benefit, family policies and work accidents. These characteristics may for example be qualifying criteria, replacement rates, duration and coverage [ 6 ]. Several international comparative databases (e.g. the Social Citizenship Indicator Programme, SCIP) provide historical information on such characteristics including policy programmes. In order to construct relevant programme features the databases apply a number of assumptions regarding for example, age and family situation of a ‘standard worker’ [ 6 ]. This could be problematic if there are important groups that fall outside the living situations captured by these type cases.

A third approach is the ‘ Expenditure approach ' , which focuses on welfare state effort and generosity by concentrating on public spending on social protection and services. The spending on social protection and services is often expressed in terms of percentage of the Gross domestic product (GDP). The rationale for this is that ‘the government should be transferring relatively the same level of social expenditure as other nations in order to be considered as providing an equivalent degree of generosity and protection’ [ 7 ]. The spending approach has been criticised for its inability to differentiate between effort and need – a large spending on unemployment benefits and programmes may simply reflect a larger share of unemployed and not a higher ambition in terms of coverage or replacement rates [ 8 ]. Recent studies have tried to overcome this problem by weighting procedures [ 5 ], and their analyses also suggest that different choices regarding the spending variable (gross/net, absolute/relative) have little impact on the results.

We are not the first to point out that there are complications with these approaches (e.g. [ 5 ]), but we believe there to be a need to clarify and describe why results are as diverse as research suggests. To our knowledge, we are the first to stratify these studies according to how they are classified in each approach, for example by welfare regime typology, something that will complement existing research.

If we look at the existing literature with a more analytical view, taking into account methodological and theoretical differences, we might be able to sort out substantial findings from ‘noise’ caused by methodological and other shortcomings. Therefore, we aim to review the literature on welfare state, health and health inequalities, taking earlier reviews as our starting point. Our analytical approach is to further classify these later studies, published 2005 and later, according to their principal way to characterise the welfare state; as regime types, as welfare institutions or as social spending. Since the regime type approach is dominating, we also attempt at further distinctions within this category in order to find patterns that might explain the inconsistent results. Based on this analytical framework, we discuss the general findings in the literature, comment on the different investigative approaches, and point to where substantial conclusions about welfare state policies and health inequalities can be made.

Search strategy

This review adopted several search strategies to detect relevant studies [see Figure  1 ]. The first step was to manually explore three large reviews related to the subject; by Beckfield and Krieger [ 9 ], Muntaner et al. [ 4 ] and Brennenstuhl et al. [ 3 ]. The NEWS report [ 10 ] was also explored since it includes studies relevant to the Institutional approach. Studies related to any of the three core approaches were selected, studies with themes such as globalisation or democracy were excluded. After reading the abstracts of the related studies, six studies were selected from Beckfield and Krieger [ 9 ], 17 from Muntaner et al. [ 4 ], 21 from Brennenstuhl et al. [ 3 ] and three relevant studies were selected from the NEWS report. This strategy yielded 31 exclusive studies. The selected articles were thoroughly read in order to make sure they were placed in the correct “pile of approaches”.

figure 1

Summary of search strategy. Summary of the search strategy used; the different identification methods and study selections.

The second step was to search for ‘related articles’ to the three reviews in PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. In order to get the most recent publications the strategy was to find articles that have cited any of the three reviews. Brennenstuhl et al. [ 3 ] (published in 2012) had not been cited any time in Web of Science, once in PubMed and five times in Google Scholar (2 articles selected). Muntaner et al. [ 4 ] (published in 2011) was cited eight times in Web of Science, twice in PubMed and 18 times in Google Scholar (1 article was selected). Finally, Beckfield and Krieger [ 9 ] (published in 2009) was cited 31 times in Web of Science (4 articles selected), seven times in PubMed (1 article selected) and 53 times in Google Scholar (4 articles selected). This strategy yielded six related exclusive studies [ 5 , 11 – 15 ].

The third step was to search for key words in Web of Science and PubMed. The searches were limited to the period 20100101–20130228 and was based on the fact that the reviews were published in 2009 [ 9 ], 2011 [ 4 ] and 2012 [ 3 ] and would therefore hopefully exhaust the number of articles prior to 2010 in this field of research. Searches were based on search terms related to the approaches mentioned above leading to three sets of search strings each combining the related terms with the health terms. Attention was put on health inequalities. An initial screening was done by looking at the titles, and thereafter the abstracts of relevant articles were read.

The first search string combined welfare regime related terms and health inequalities ((welfare state* or welfare typ* or welfare regime*) AND (health inequalit* or health inequit* or health disparit*) AND (Humans[Mesh])) and resulted in 182 citations in Web of Science and 622 citations in PubMed. Seven relevant “new” studies were found.

The second search string combined policy-related terms and health inequalities ((social polic* or health polic* or family polic* or pension polic*) AND (health inequalit* or health inequit* or health disparit)* AND (Humans[Mesh])) and resulted in 2230 citations in Web of Science and 654 citations in PubMed. Two relevant “new” studies were found.

The third search string combined expenditure-related terms and health inequalities ((spending or expenditure or welfare state generosity) AND (health inequalit* or health inequit* or health disparit*) AND (Humans[Mesh])) and resulted in 466 citations in Web of Science and 625 citations in PubMed. Seven relevant “new” studies were found.

The fourth, and final, step was to manually explore the reference lists of the selected articles. This resulted in one study [ 16 ], relevant to the ‘Institutional approach’.

Inclusion criteria

Articles selected for this review had to be an empirical peer-reviewed study published in English in an International journal. They had to be published between January 2005 and February 2013 in order to get recent results. Studies should address any type of health outcome (both morbidity and mortality measures) and preferably social inequalities in health (stratified by education, income or other relevant measure). Studies examining health inequalities based on ethnicity and minority groups were excluded. The study population could be from all age groups. Studies using data from industrial countries including East Asia were included.

Specific inclusion criteria for the ‘Regime approach’ were that studies should include cross-national comparisons of different health outcomes. The countries in the analysis could either be groups of countries or typical representatives of a welfare regime, or other cross-national country or regional comparisons. The number of countries used for comparisons had to be at least two countries.

A specific inclusion criterion for the ‘Institutional approach’ was that focus should be placed on welfare state indicators (replacement rates and coverage of specific social policies such as pensions and family benefits) and levels of generosity in social policy delivery, and look at to what extent variations in generosity and/or coverage are linked to variations in different health outcomes.

A specific inclusion criterion for the ‘Expenditure approach’ was that studies should examine different levels of social/health spending or social transfers measured as government health or social spending.

The total number of studies selected for this review is 54 [see Figure  2 ]. Thirty-four studies have been selected for the ‘Regime approach' , 14 studies for the ‘Institutional approach’ and eight for the ‘Expenditure approach’. One study [ 17 ] has been placed in all three approaches.

figure 2

The three approaches used in comparative welfare research. Figure illustrating the three main approaches to comparative research as well as the authors of the studies included in each approach. The Regime approach is further divided based on main typology used.

The studies in the ‘Regime approach’ have been sorted according to different criteria; by outcome (both by morbidity and mortality outcomes, but also according to where health was found to be the best), by type of data used, and by the number of countries under study. Since no clear results have been found we have decided to analyse and summarise the characteristics and findings of the different groups of typology/country comparisons. A short section of the other results can be found after the Regime approach results.

The studies in the ‘Institutional approach’ have been sorted according to policy theme and the studies in the ‘Expenditure approach’ have been sorted by either social or public spending.

The Regime approach

The ‘Regime approach’ is the largest approach with 34 studies fitting the criteria. An Additional file shows the descriptive characteristics of the studies [see Additional file 1 ]. This approach is the most common way of examining cross-national welfare state comparisons of health and health inequalities and there seems to be a pattern of increased popularity with time. Detailed timelines of the studies’ publication year can be found in an Additional file [see Additional file 2 ]. Among the 34 studies in the ‘Regime approach' , 26 examined overall population health and almost two thirds of the studies (n = 21) examined socioeconomic inequalities in health (some studies look at both). More than a third of these (8/21) examine inequalities by social class, which is often based on two or more variables related to education and income. Different variables are used to measure health; self-rated health is the most common measure (13/34). When health measures are categorised as either mortality or morbidity related measure one finds that it is more common to use morbidity measures (32 compared to 18). Most studies use a typology approach (28), and those based on Ferrera’s typology [ 18 ] are most common.

Different typologies

The three main regime typologies dominating the ‘Regime approach’ are the typologies by Esping-Andersen [ 19 ], Ferrera [ 18 ] and Huber and colleagues [ 20 , 21 ] [see Table  1 ]. This has also been found in the review by Brennenstuhl et al. [ 3 ].

These three typologies have in the studies selected for this review often been modified by either adding a regime type or adding countries to existing regime types, thereby changing the set-up of the typology somewhat. For a full table of typologies used in the studies selected see an Additional file [Additional file 3 ]. The most influential typology by Esping-Andersen [ 19 ] is constituted by three regime types in which highly developed countries (mainly European) were fitted [see subsection ‘Theoretical description- Esping-Andersen’ for further information]. With time, additional regime types have been added by various authors. The typology by Ferrera is often described as being based on the work by Esping-Andersen but includes features that makes it stand on its own [see subsection ‘Theoretical description- Ferrera’]. Quite a few authors have chosen to base their modification on Ferrera’s typology rather than Esping-Andersen’s. For example, Eikemo et al. e.g. [ 22 ] add a fifth regime type, the Eastern European, and Karim et al. [ 23 ] add a sixth, the East Asian. The typology by Huber and colleagues [ 20 , 21 ] has also been modified by many [see subsection ‘Theoretical description- Huber and Stephens’]. Navarro for example, together with different co-authors, have modified it in different articles by removing one regime type and adding a new one [ 24 – 26 ].

Most countries, regardless of the typology used, remain in some sort of core regime cluster. Austria and The Netherlands sometimes move from the Conservative/Bismarckian/Christian democratic group to the Social democratic group but the majority of research tends to label these countries as Conservative. Australia sometimes moves from the Liberal/Anglo-Saxon cluster to a separate group called Radical/Targeted/Wage-earner.

Esping-Andersen

The original Esping-Andersen typology with three welfare state clusters is used by four out of nine studies [ 17 , 27 – 29 ]. The remaining five studies have used modified versions by adding a Radical regime [ 30 , 31 ], a Latin regime [ 32 ], or a Mediterranean and Eastern/Post-communist/Post-socialist regime [ 33 , 34 ]. Self-rated health and life expectancy are the most common health measures and are used in three studies respectively. Mortality measures are almost as common as morbidity measures. Descriptive characteristics of studies in the Esping-Andersen group are shown in Table  2 .

Seven studies examine population health. Four of these find that health is better in the Nordic countries. The measures of health are infant mortality [ 27 , 32 ] self-reported happiness [ 30 ] and mortality rate [ 28 ] (for women). One study finds that male mortality rates are better in Conservative regimes [ 28 ]. Other studies find that health is better in other regimes (mainly Southern and Central European regimes), regarding outcomes such as life expectancy [ 17 , 34 ] and self-rated health [ 29 , 34 ]. Four out of nine studies examine inequalities in health and results regarding differences between regimes vary. One study finds some evidence of smaller inequalities in Social democratic countries for men but not for women [ 29 ]. The three other studies find that health inequalities in mortality [ 28 ] and self-rated health [ 31 ] are smaller in Conservative regimes. Another finds that inequalities in self-rated health are smaller in Liberal and Eastern regimes, and inequalities in general wellbeing and health symptom load are smallest in Liberal and Southern regimes [ 33 ]. For further information on study characteristics and results see an Additional file [see Additional file 4 : Esping-Andersen].

Theoretical description- Esping-Andersen

Esping-Andersen’s (E-A) typology proposed in ‘The three worlds of welfare capitalism’ [ 19 ] in 1990 is the most well-known and has been criticised and modified by many (e.g. [ 18 , 35 ]). Eighteen Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries were categorised into ideal clusters of welfare states based on principles regarding unemployment, sickness and pension benefits [ 36 ]. The clusters of countries are classified according to three principles:

Decommodification: the extent to which an individual’s welfare is reliant upon the market, particularly in terms of pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness insurance

Social stratification: the role of welfare states in maintaining or breaking down social stratification; and the

Private-public mix: the relative roles of the state, the family, the voluntary sector and the market in welfare provision.

The operationalisation of these principles was based mainly on decommodification indexes and led to three ideal welfare regime types [ 19 , 36 ]:

Liberal countries where policies are based on the idea that people are responsible for their own welfare. In other words, state welfare provision is minimal, benefits are modest and the criteria for entitlement are often strict, and recipients are usually means-tested and stigmatised. The countries in the liberal regime type are Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and the USA.

Conservative countries where access to social support is often earnings-related and administered through the employer. It is distinguished by its “status differentiating” welfare programmes which tend to maintain existing social patterns. These regimes are usually shaped by historical church traditions and the role of the family is emphasised. The countries in the conservative regime type are Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Switzerland.

Social Democratic countries which belong to the smallest regime cluster and are quite the opposite of liberal and conservative welfare regimes in that there is a public responsibility for welfare and that access to services and benefits is universal. Welfare provision is characterised by comparatively generous benefits, a commitment to full employment and income protection, and a strongly interventionist state used to promote equality through a redistributive social security system. The countries in the social democratic regime type are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

This typology has offered an influential typology that has encouraged much research. E-A’s main goal was to describe relationships between states, labour markets, and families and his typology is based on characteristics that refer to both institutions and outcomes [ 37 ]. It is important to remember that it was not developed to account for cross-national differences in health or health inequalities [ 5 ] and one must therefore bear in mind that it does not necessarily mean that this typology should have an immediate and direct effect on health and health inequalities.

Modified version

Castles and Mitchell

Castles and Mitchell [ 35 ] have, in 1993, built on E-A’s typology and focus on welfare state differences in redistribution of social transfers and provision of welfare services [ 31 ]. Different countries levels of aggregate expenditure and degree of benefit equality were examined [ 36 ] and based on this analysis they argued that Australia, New Zealand and the UK made up a targeted welfare state, the Radical welfare state.

The original Ferrera typology is used by three out of 13 studies [ 36 , 38 , 39 ]. The remaining 10 have all modified the typology by adding Eastern Europe, and in some cases East Asia. Morbidity measures are more common to use. Self-rated health is the most common and is used in eight studies. Descriptive characteristics of studies in the Ferrera group can be found in Table  3 .

Nine studies report results related to population health. Two studies find that health (limiting longstanding illness, psychosocial quality of work and depressive symptoms) is better in Scandinavian countries compared to other regimes [ 38 , 40 ]. One study finds that health complaints are lower in Scandinavian regime and higher in Eastern and Southern regimes [ 12 ]. Two studies look at both infant mortality and life expectancy and both find that infant mortality rates are lowest in Scandinavian countries and that life expectancy is highest in East Asian countries [ 23 , 41 ]. Another study finds that life expectancy is higher in the Nordic countries for men, but for women it is higher in Confucian countries (East Asian) [ 11 ]. The same authors find that younger age mortality is lower in the Nordic countries but not for older age mortality. Four studies find that health is not the best in the Nordic countries. They instead find that self-rated health is better in Anglo-Saxon countries [ 22 , 42 ], in Bismarckian countries [ 43 ] or in Southern countries [ 12 ]. Limiting longstanding illness seems to be least reported in the Southern regimes [ 22 , 43 ].

Eight out of 13 studies look at inequalities in health and results regarding differences between regimes vary. Some find support of the Nordic countries performing better and having smaller inequalities while others find the opposite. Results vary by health outcome and gender making it difficult to draw any clear-cut conclusions. One study finds differences by welfare state regime, with inequalities being largest in Anglo-Saxon, Bismarckian and Scandinavian regimes [ 44 ]. They also find that women seem to be more affected by unemployment in the Scandinavian countries. Others find that health inequalities by income [ 22 ] and education [ 43 ] generally seem to be the smallest in Bismarckian regimes. Another study finds that inequalities in life expectancy are the smallest in the Southern regimes for women and are for men smaller in the Nordic countries, but the inequalities are measured as individual variation mainly [ 11 ]. Another study finds that social inequalities in sickness were lowest in the Southern regime for men and for women inequalities were lowest in Scandinavian regimes [ 40 ]. Drawing general conclusions are further complicated by results that vary by cohort and gender [ 36 ]. Some studies find no differences [ 12 ] or no consistent welfare regime patterning [ 39 ]. For further information on study characteristics and results see an Additional file [see Additional file 4 : Ferrera].

Theoretical description- Ferrera

After an extensive debate about E-A’s typology, Ferrera [ 18 ] introduced a modified typology in 1996 by focusing more on differences in how the social benefits are delivered as compared to E-A’s, where quantity of welfare provided was emphasised [ 45 ]. In doing this a new regime type, the Southern, was included. This lead to a typology with four different regime types; the Scandinavian (Social democratic), the Bismarckian (Conservative), the Anglo-Saxon (Liberal) and the Southern European (Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain). Southern welfare states are described as ‘rudimentary’ [ 18 ] because they are still characterised by a highly fragmented system of welfare provision and welfare services [ 46 ]. Another prominent feature is the reliance on the family and voluntary sector [ 18 , 36 ].

Modified versions

Eikemo and colleagues

Another advancement in the welfare regime research has been to include an additional fifth regime type, the East European, suggested by for example Eikemo et al. in 2008 [ 22 , 42 , 43 ]. For this, Ferrera’s typology was used and expanded by adding a category composed of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia [ 42 ]. Estonia and Slovakia are also included in some studies [ 22 , 43 ]. This group of countries has a history with economic instabilities and social reforms during the 1990’s [ 47 ] and were argued to form a fifth regime with similar characteristics.

Karim et al.

Karim, Eikemo and Bambra [ 23 ] have in 2010 argued that East Asian welfare states also form a cluster of countries and further modify the typology by Eikemo and add a sixth group which includes the East Asian countries (Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). The welfare regimes of the East Asian countries are characterised by low levels of interventions by the government, low investment in social welfare, an underdeveloped provision of public service and a strong reliance on family (e.g. [ 23 ]).

In 2013, Popham [ 11 ] used Ferrera’s typology as inspiration and added more countries and extra regimes to the typology. Apart from the typical regime types: Anglo-Saxon; Bismarckian; Nordic; and Southern European, three new regimes are added. These are the Eastern European regime, the Ex-Soviet regime and the Confucian regime.

Huber and colleagues

The five studies in this group have used different modified versions of the typology by Huber and colleagues and they mainly examine European countries, with analyses based on data from nine countries [ 24 ] to 21 countries [ 48 ]. Morbidity measures are more common to use. Self-rated health is most common and used in three studies [ 24 , 25 , 48 ]. Descriptive characteristics of studies in the Huber and colleagues group are shown in Table  4 .

Three studies examine population health. Two of these find that health is better in Social democratic countries, one found this for infant mortality and low birth weight [ 49 ] and the other for self-rated health [ 24 ]. The third found that the Eastern European countries have the lowest levels of self-rated health and no significant differences between the other regimes [ 48 ].

Three studies have a health inequality approach. One study finds that inequalities in self-rated health and limiting longstanding illness are found in all three regimes (Social democratic, Christian democratic and Late democratic) but that differences between the social classes are more marked in Late democracies [ 24 ]. They also find that education based inequalities in the same health measures are larger in Social democratic countries compared to Christian democratic (for men). Another study also finds that inequalities exist in all regimes (Social democratic, Christian democratic, Liberal and Late democracy) but find gender differences across regimes [ 25 ]. For women, inequalities are larger in Social democratic countries compared to Late democracies and for men, inequalities are smaller in Social democratic compared to the three other regimes. Navarro et al. [ 26 ] find that Social democratic ideologies tend to implement redistributive policies which reduce social inequalities in health, which perhaps indirectly states that inequalities are smaller in Social democratic regimes. An Additional file shows further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 4 : Huber and colleagues].

Theoretical description- Huber and Stephens (and data by Huber, Ragin and Stephens [ 21 ])

The typology by Huber and Stephens [ 20 ] developed in 2001 is based on political traditions and the allocation of countries is based on the number of years that a country has been governed by a party belonging to a particular political tradition since the 1950’s. The four political traditions are Social democratic (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden: the most pro-redistributive) Liberal (Canada, Ireland, UK and USA), Christian democratic (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland: the least pro-redistributive) and Wage Earners (Australia and New Zealand). Parties in each political tradition display a similar level of commitment to redistributive policies [ 26 ].

Different authors have developed this typology further by adding or removing countries or regimes. Navarro, together with different co-authors have removed one regime type, the Wage-Earner, and added another, the ex-Fascist regime or the Late democracies which include Portugal and Spain, and sometimes Greece [ 24 – 26 ]. Other authors have added a fifth regime type consisting of countries in Eastern Europe [ 48 ].

Other typology- Korpi and Palme

Sanders et al. [ 50 ] is the only study using this typology [see subsection ‘Theoretical description- Korpi and Palme’]. This study is the only study using oral health as a measure of health. They find that average dental health is better in Finland (representing the Encompassing regime/Social democratic) and worse in Australia (representing the Basic security regime/Liberal). Income-based inequalities were larger in Finland compared to Germany (Corporatist regime). Further information on study characteristics and results can be found in an Additional file [see Additional file 4 : Korpi and Palme].

Theoretical description- Korpi and Palme

In 1998, Korpi and Palme [ 37 ] based their typology on the institutional characteristics of welfare states by looking at different countries’ capacity to alleviate income inequality and poverty, specifically examining old age pensions and sickness cash benefits. The classification was based on coverage and generosity and generated five different ideal institutional types characterised as the Basic security, the Corporatist, the Encompassing, the Targeted, and the Voluntary State Subsidised types [ 38 , 50 ].

Geographical comparisons

The six studies in this group mainly examine differences in health between different European countries or regions and two studies include the United States as a typical Liberal country [ 51 , 52 ]. Countries/regions are not clustered and there is no apparent link to welfare state characteristics. Self-rated health is the most common health measure and is used in four studies [ 13 , 52 – 54 ] and morbidity measures are generally more common. Descriptive characteristics of studies in the Geographical comparisons group are displayed in Table  5 .

Four studies examine population health and all studies report that the Nordic countries have the best health, but findings differ by various factors. One study finds that young Icelandic people have better self-rated health than American people but that the opposite is found after age 50 [ 52 ]. Another finds that although the Nordic countries are still in the lead, the Southern countries are catching up rapidly regarding mortality related measures of health [ 55 ]. A third study finds that self-rated health seems to be the best in Sweden, Norway and Denmark but is actually the worst in Finland [ 53 ]. Finally, a fourth finds that self-rated health is the best in Social democratic countries compared to other European countries and this effect is largely mediated by more equal income distribution [ 13 ].

Five studies have an inequality approach to population health. The results vary in presentation and have different focus points, but four out of five studies point to positive results for Nordic/Social democratic countries. One study finds that the effects of affluence and self-rated health are weaker in Iceland [ 52 ]. Another finds that education based inequalities in self-rated health have between the 1980’s and 1990’s remained stable in the Nordic countries but have increased in for example Spain, Italy and the Netherlands [ 53 ]. A third uses the Gini coefficient as a measure of inequality and finds that the Nordic countries have the lowest scores which seems to be related to better self-rated health and a higher Gini coefficient score is negatively related to self-rated health [ 13 ]. Another study finds that education has more effect on health (morbidity) in Western and Southern Europe and that it is insignificantly related in Northern Europe [ 54 ]. Another study finds that inequalities in health are smaller in the United States than in Denmark [ 51 ], in contrast to the results of the studies mentioned above which all find positive results for the Nordic countries. An Additional file shows further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 4 : Geographical comparisons].

The Regime approach and health

There is great variation in the results presented in the studies when grouped according to what typology they have used, making it problematic to draw generalisable conclusions regarding where population health is better and inequalities in health are the smallest.

The variation in findings across studies applying a regime approach is not possible to understand as a result of the regime typology chosen or the amendments used and we still find a patchy picture with contradictory findings. Nevertheless, since the studies in this category also differ in several other aspects it is still possible that theoretical and empirical differences could account for the diversity in findings.

The studies were initially grouped according to the main outcome; i.e. where health was found to be the best, but no apparent common patterns could be found. Results differed in numerous ways, for example with time, by gender, by measures of population health and health inequalities, making it difficult to draw any conclusions.

The studies were then grouped according to use of health outcome. The studies in this review have used either morbidity- or mortality related measures and although these are both valid measures of health, they might give different results. The two big groups that are classified as mortality related measures are life expectancy and infant mortality. The studies that look at life expectancy find that East Asian countries have higher life expectancy than other regimes. The studies that examine infant mortality find that the Nordic countries have the lowest rates of infant mortality. Few studies examine inequalities and do not give any clear results.

Studies that look at morbidity measures such as self-rated health find mixed results. Some find that the Nordic countries have better self-rated health while others find that other regimes have better health. No consensus regarding which regime has the best health can be found; some find that Liberal countries have better health than Conservative, and others find the opposite. No clear pattern is seen for inequalities in self-rated health; there is no consensus of which regime has the smallest.

The studies were then listed according to the number of countries of which the studies are based but no apparent pattern could be found.

Finally, the studies were grouped according to the type of data used. All studies using ESS data, except for one, which does not find any significant differences between the typologies, find that other countries, and not the Nordic countries, have the best health. Most of these studies use self-rated health as health outcome. It seems as though other countries have smaller inequalities compared to the Nordic countries. Most of these studies are from one main group of authors, namely Bambra and Eikemo, and most look at Scandinavian/Social democratic, Conservative, Liberal, Southern and Eastern European countries. Most studies using OECD data conclude that Nordic countries have better health. Most of these use infant mortality as a measure of health. Regarding inequalities in health, it is difficult to draw any conclusions.

Institutional approach

The Institutional approach is the second largest of the three groups with 14 studies fitting the criteria. Five studies use a health inequality perspective, examining inequalities by socioeconomic position/status, type of mother (lone vs. coupled), education and income. The studies have been classified according to main type of policy area: family [ 15 , 16 , 56 – 59 ], pensions [ 17 , 59 – 61 ], economic assistance and unemployment benefits [ 58 , 62 , 63 ] and access to health care [ 64 – 66 ]. Two articles cover several policy areas [ 58 , 59 ]. The selected studies together use 12 different health measures (13 if including ‘immunisation’), some use several and some only one. It is more common to use mortality measures (used 15 times) as health indicator than it is morbidity measures (used 10 times). Descriptive characteristics of studies with an Institutional approach can be found in Table  6 .

Family benefits

There is general consensus that generous family benefits and the dual-earner family policy model are beneficial for health, both for adults’ self-rated health and also child mortality. Universal family policies seem to be beneficial for all, not only those who use it. One study [ 15 ] looks at inequalities in health and uses ‘type of mother’ as measure of stratification. They find that generous family policies provide protection from poor health, poverty and unemployment to mothers in general and particularly to lone mothers. An Additional file shows further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 5 : Family benefits].

Pension benefits

There seems to be general agreement of generous pensions being related to better health and higher life expectancy. Most studies suggest that basic security pensions are associated with lower old age excess mortality [ 59 , 61 ] and a higher life expectancy [ 17 ]. There is less evidence supporting income security pensions’ effect on health. The different pension benefits perhaps work differently for men and women: income security pensions seem more important for men’s health and basic security pensions seem more important for women’s [ 60 ]. For further information on study characteristics and results see an Additional file [see Additional file 5 : Pension benefits].

Economic assistance and unemployment benefits

Universal systems of economic assistance [ 62 ] and unemployment benefits [ 58 , 63 ] seem to be associated with a healthier population. This seems to apply to the whole population, not only to the health of the unemployed [ 58 ]. An Additional file shows further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 5 : Economic assistance and unemployment benefits].

Access to health care

Absolute inequalities in mortality by socioeconomic status (income and education) seem to decrease with universal health care. However, the relative gap seems to increase, i.e. advantaged people obtain disproportionate benefits of health care, and access, or perhaps adherence to health care seems lower for people in lower socioeconomic groups [ 64 , 66 ]. For further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 5 : Access to health care].

The institutional approach and health

Most studies in this approach seem to agree that generous policies and benefits are associated with health in a positive way for all people in a population, not only those who are directly affected or targeted and receive the actual benefit.

Expenditure approach

The Expenditure approach is the smallest of the three approaches, only eight studies fit the criteria. There is perhaps an increased tendency of using this approach for cross-country comparisons of population health (see Additional file 2 for detailed timelines of publication year). Two studies use a health inequality perspective and both examine inequalities by education and were published in 2012. One study covers both social and health spending, three studies cover social spending only, and four cover health spending only. The selected studies use various health measures, nine different in total. Some studies analyse several health measures and others look at only one. By categorising the health outcomes into either an outcome related to mortality or morbidity, one finds that different mortality outcomes are the most common (11 compared to 4). Descriptive characteristics of studies with an Expenditure approach are shown in Table  7 .

Health spending

Some studies find that health spending is associated with life expectancy and maternal mortality [ 67 ], general mortality and a reduction of life years lost [ 68 ], and lower infant mortality rates [ 69 ]. One study finds that social spending on health is negatively correlated with health for women and unrelated for men [ 48 ]. The authors suggest that a reason for this might be that additional spending on health might have little effect on OECD countries since expenditure levels are already high in many of these countries. One study [ 70 ] looks at inequalities and finds that in countries where the government spends a lot of money on healthcare (and has a highly modernised labour market) the relative risk of lower educated people being in poor health is smaller. An Additional file shows further information on study characteristics and results [see Additional file 6 : Health spending].

Social spending

Two studies find that social spending is associated with life expectancy, infant mortality, potential years of life lost [ 67 ], and mortality [ 71 ]. One study [ 17 ] finds conflicting results; the relationship between social spending and life expectancy vary from cross-section to cross-section. The study finds that initial investment in social policy leads to increases in life expectancy but after a certain level of spending, the extra spending does not contribute that much. The study looking at health inequalities [ 5 ] finds that social spending seems to be associated with lower education based inequalities in health among women and, to a lesser degree, among men. Additionally, those with primary education benefit more from high social transfers than those with tertiary education. For further information on study characteristics and results see an Additional file [see Additional file 6 : Social spending].

The expenditure approach and health

Most studies in the Expenditure approach agree that social and health spending is associated with increased levels of health in one way or the other. The studies that do not find these positive associations do not see consistent findings over time. These studies also show evidence that after a certain level of spending additional spending does not contribute that much, showing a curvilinear association. Both studies with the inequality perspective find that spending is beneficial for those with lower educational status. Both studies examine self-rated health and therefore no conclusions can be drawn regarding mortality (which is the most common use of measure in this approach).

The starting point for this review has been the mixed and contradictory findings arising from research on welfare state characteristics and health and health inequalities. These contradictions either suggest that 1) policies directed at the causes of the causes are much less important for health and health inequalities than we have been assuming, or 2) there are fundamental theoretical and/or empirical shortcomings in many studies in this field. This area evidently needs to be further explored in order to fully understand the inconsistent results and is of importance not only to welfare research but also to epidemiology. The results in this review add an important piece to the puzzle by clarifying and describing why previous studies have not been able to come to unequivocal conclusions.

Our analytical approach has been to sort the relevant studies found according to their approach to measure welfare state characteristics, something that to our knowledge, has not been done before. Of the three main types (regime, institutional and expenditure), the Regime approach is by far the most common. However, while the fundamental approach is the same for these studies we find large variations in the theoretical basis as well as the countries and regime types included. In Esping-Andersen’s original work [ 19 ] several clusters of countries are actually being suggested based on de-commodification, social stratification, and the private-public mix of social provision, respectively. Most followers are using de-commodification as their starting point. In addition, many studies in this public health field that employ Esping-Andersen’s work make amendments of clusters and countries and the theoretical underpinning is therefore not as strong as often assumed.

However, even when we sort studies according to the regime theory employed and the amendments made to these, results are diverse and contradictory. Hence, it is not inconsistencies between different theories or different empirical applications of these that is the only or main problem, but a more general problem with welfare state regimes when applied to outcomes such as health and health inequalities.

A further problem is that different health measures are used, which adds to the complexity of drawing conclusions about where health is the best and health inequalities the smallest since choice of measure will highly affect the outcome and the conclusions drawn. When stratifying our material according to type of health measure used some consistent results can be found regarding levels of mortality. Morbidity related measures show mixed results and may reflect data and reporting problems. However, in search for consistencies regarding health inequalities, not much added clarity is achieved.

Many researchers in comparative welfare regime and health research agree that welfare states cluster together into certain regimes. However, there is less agreement about which typology to apply and when, and this therefore remains an open issue. Since there is no total agreement about which typology to use, several classifications have emerged, many of which are rather similar and overlap each other, all intending to capture the essence of a welfare state. These typologies have sometimes emerged on unclear grounds, for example, it seems as though some have emerged based on the country data available to each author and not on strong theoretical grounds. Interpretations and comparisons of findings from these studies will be complicated by typologies that have been constructed differently and further used as an independent variable aiming to ‘explain’ variations in health and health inequalities across countries. By adding a regime such as the Eastern European regime, the picture becomes more complete, but it also becomes more complex and this tends to change the whole focus of the study. These studies tend to find that Central and Eastern European countries fare the worst. The health situation in former communist countries is an important and complicated issue in its own right. However, while this is likely to be linked to social and policy factors it is questionable if the addition of these countries to the existing and already conflicting research is especially helpful.

This field of research has a long history of debate. Many critics have pointed out that there are problems with typologising. One of the most outspoken is Baldwin [ 72 ], who in 1996 critically wrote that two countries in a regime cluster can be inconsistent among policy areas, and that welfare state studies have “exhausted its explanatory power and is no longer bearing fruit”. Kasza [ 73 ], is another who in 2003 concluded that “few national welfare systems are likely to exhibit the internal consistency necessary to validate the regime concept, and that policy-specific comparisons may be a more promising avenue for comparative research”. Mackenbach [ 74 ] is more recent and writes in 2012 that Esping-Andersen’s typology is not “suitable for distinguishing countries with different types of health care provision. Generousness or universalism in other parts of the welfare state, e.g. for income support, does not appear to predict generousness or universalism of health care provision”. The UK for example, is usually placed in the Liberal regime group, but at the same time, it has a universal health system free of charge. Mackenbach [ 74 ] suggests “that if we want to study the health impacts of welfare arrangements we might better not take Esping-Andersen’s classification as starting point”. On the other hand, many researchers refer to Southern, Northern and other groups of countries in a way that suggest an underlying idea about fundamental commonalities in those groups (including Mackenbach).

With time comes change, and all is well if all countries in each welfare state cluster move forward together, but this is seldom the case. Countries will have different experiences and might well move in different directions at different paces. A country can with time go through policy changes in eligibility, structures or financing that could technically and potentially reposition it from one regime cluster to another. Although these transformations might be “work in progress”, quite a few researchers agree that countries and their politics change with time. For example, Kvist et al. [ 75 ] concluded that the small changes found across policies for families with children, for the unemployed, for the ill, and for the older in the 2000s, when added together, challenge the concept of the Nordic welfare policies. Kuivalainen and Nelson [ 76 ] find that the social assistance in the Nordic countries is moving closer to some of the features and outcomes of other regimes in terms of benefit generosity and poverty outcomes. They conclude that the Nordic social assistance classification into a separate model of social welfare is not as distinct as it was 20 years ago. A recent OECD report about income inequalities finds that in Sweden, many times seen as the archetypical Nordic country, the relative income poverty rate has increased the most during the last 20 years and particularly among children and youth. In other words, Sweden’s capacity to protect the vulnerable groups against poverty has been weakened due to an inability to keep up with the increases in general income [ 77 ]. If this continues the Nordic countries might experience poverty rates similar to those in several Liberal and Conservative welfare states meaning that one of the most significant features of the Nordic welfare states will disappear [ 76 ].

Hence, our first conclusion based on earlier reviews and our own attempts to analyse the reasons for diverging and conflicting findings from the growing body of research on welfare state characteristics and health/health inequalities is that the welfare state Regime approach is not a fruitful way forward. We do not assert that this can be extended as a general conclusion. Rather, the Regime approach has been important for welfare state research, and especially so perhaps for analyses of the welfare state as a dependent variable. It can also be highly informative for descriptive purposes. But as a tool for analyses of how policies and institutions that impact on the wider social determinants of health actually affect health inequalities, it is simply too crude and imprecise. When adding the fact that few studies in practice adopt the same Regime approach (although many use the same labels), there is no wonder that the results produced are diverging and even conflicting.

In recent years there has been a theoretical and methodological development of welfare state models and regimes, where both the ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare state activities are included [ 78 , 79 ]. This allows for a more complex categorisation of strengths and weaknesses in different countries where both education and active labour market programmes (‘productive’), and employment and income protection (‘protective’) policies are considered. To our knowledge this has not yet been applied to health and health inequalities outcomes, but given that this approach produces a more nuanced picture where also countries outside the traditional OECD countries can be included [ 80 ], it seems more promising than more traditional ways of clustering countries. Another development in comparative welfare research is the “Varieties of Capitalism” approach [ 81 ] which compares countries based on type of capitalism. Both of these do, however, still represent a clustering of countries, and although they are likely to be more promising than the different ideal types typically employed in the studies included in our review, several of the caveats are likely to apply.

In contrast to regime types, the Institutional and Expenditure approach focus on the more specific “welfare outputs” delivered by the welfare state, either captured as the formal legislated rights that people have or the money spent on the programme. Hence, the approaches are much more able to study specific policies but can easily also study the total effort by combining different rights/spendings. Another major difference between these two approaches and the Regime approach is that where the Regime approach has to rely on country cluster average differences, the Institutional and Expenditure approaches give us a variable approach. This means that we can allow for countries to differ in their policies in different areas of interest (social protection, family policies, health care policies, labour market policies etc.). This, in turn, is likely to increase the policy relevance of studies as well as our understanding of the processes involved when health inequalities are generated.

While the Institutional and Expenditure approaches are more promising in principle for health inequality research, there are to date a limited number of studies of this kind. Yet, the clear impression from taking these studies combined is still that more social spending and more generous social rights lines up with lower mortality, better health and, probably, smaller health inequalities. We would like to see more studies using these approaches, but on basis of the ones that exist it is tempting to suggest a solution to the ‘Nordic paradox’; while welfare policies of a ‘Nordic’ kind is indeed promoting better health and smaller health inequalities, it not the case that such policies are mainly found in the Nordic countries. When looking at country clusters, ‘better’ and ‘worse’ policies for public health and health inequalities are found in many clusters, and the results becomes highly dependent on the countries actually included. When looking directly at institutional social rights or social spending the relations between policies and health outcomes becomes uncovered in a much clearer way.

It is important to stress that the Institutional approach to a large extent was formulated as a critique of the Expenditure approach. The latter has been accused of being faulty since it does not address two of the main features of a welfare state; social citizenship and social rights. There have also been doubts regarding that high spending means nothing more than extensive social problems. The level of spending might therefore not tell us much about the characteristics of a welfare state’s social or health programmes. Kangas and Palme [ 8 ] find that the advanced rich countries seem to use roughly the same amount of their GDP on welfare. Even though spending levels are similar, the distributional consequences can be greatly divergent. However, this critique has also led to adaptations and procedures to take differences in need into account, thereby closing the gap between the two approaches in empirical terms at least [ 5 , 82 ].

But, the Institutional approach focusing on legislated social rights has shortcomings too. It tends to capture the principles for certain type cases, while the lived experience of people in need of social protection can be something else. It might also be important to include several dimensions of social rights, like coverage and replacement rates, to get a balanced picture. In contrast to spending data, such data on the legislated rights are not produced routinely but requires large efforts to collect. Hence, there are weaknesses and strengths to both approaches, and in relation to outcomes like health inequalities, they are likely to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

Limitations

This review was based on empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals. There is a small risk that other studies of welfare states and health inequalities are to be found in e.g. the grey literature, but if so these have been overlooked.

We have set the starting point for the literature search to 2005 and relevant studies prior to this year have been missed in our search. However, we started off by revising the three large reviews [ 3 , 4 , 9 ], which are based partly on studies prior to 2005, and their results are also somewhat inconsistent regarding welfare research and health inequalities. This indicates that studies prior to 2005 would not contribute much to the overall picture. In addition, the Publication timelines [see Additional file 2 ] indicate that the number of studies increases over time, which means that the risk that we have missed important studies prior to 2005 is small.

Most importantly, however, it is necessary to notice that the three approaches identified are unbalanced; the Regime approach is by far the largest. While this means that our conclusions regarding the Regime approach are fairly well underpinned, conclusions regarding the merits of the Institutional and Expenditure approaches are based on a small number of studies. While this reflects the reality, it is important to keep in mind when evaluating our conclusions. For example, if more studies are produced using these two approaches it may well be that less consistent results emerge also for them.

The wider social determinants of health, the causes of the causes, are of great importance for health and well-being, and the collective resources in terms of social protections and services provided by the welfare state are likely to be more important for those that have fewer resources in their own control. From this follows that a range of welfare state policies are important for health and health inequalities, but the question is how we best can study this in more detail. Most likely, there is not one answer to that question. However, earlier reviews and our own attempts to find some consistency strongly suggest that further studies of the Welfare Regime approach and health inequalities do not seem to lead us much further.

Instead, we will need a multitude of different types of studies, including larger analyses of social spending and social rights in various policy areas and how these are linked to health in different social strata. But, we also need more detailed evaluation of specific programmes or interventions, as well as more qualitative analyses of the experiences of different types of policies among the people and families that need to draw on the collective resources. There are many roads that will take us forward towards a better understanding of how health inequalities are generated and how policies directed to the social determinants of health can prevent or amplify these processes.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jennie Bacchus Hertzman for support with literature search, and to colleagues within the DRIVERS project, in particular Peter Goldblatt and Espen Dahl, for comments on an earlier draft.

The research leading to these results was carried out within the framework of the DRIVERS project ( http://www.health-gradient.eu ) coordinated by EuroHealthNet, and has received funding from the European Union (FP7 2007–2013) under grant agreement n° 278350, and (to MÅY) by The bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (grant agreement no: P09-0908:1), and (to OL) by the FAS Center grant Human Society as a Life-long Determinant of Health (grant agreement no: 2006–1518).

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KB, OL and MÅY all made important contributions to the manuscript. KB had the main responsibility for drafting the manuscript. OL and MÅY contributed substantially to the design of the study. KB conducted the literature searches, screened all potentially relevant studies as part of the preliminary inclusion/exclusion and reviewed papers obtained for inclusion, wrote the methodology and results section, and part of the background and discussion. OL wrote part of the introduction and discussion. OL and MÅY reviewed papers for which there was disagreement as to whether they should be included. All authors participated in discussions regarding methodology and findings, and reviewed drafts of the manuscript and approved the final version.

Electronic supplementary material

12889_2013_7630_moesm1_esm.docx.

Additional file 1: Descriptive characteristics of the studies with a regime approach (n = 34). This file contains a table with descriptive characteristics of the articles included in the Regime approach. It includes details of publication year, countries under study, health inequality measures, health outcome variables, and number of times each typology group has been used. (DOCX 20 KB)

12889_2013_7630_MOESM2_ESM.docx

Additional file 2: Timelines of publication year. This file contains four timeline figures of publication year of the selected studies. The first shows all studies included in the review, the remaining timelines display the publication dates of the studies selected for the three main approaches to comparative welfare research; the Regime approach, the Institutional approach, and the Expenditure approach. (DOCX 66 KB)

12889_2013_7630_MOESM3_ESM.docx

Additional file 3: Table of the different typologies used in the studies included in this review. This file contains a table illustrating the different welfare regime typologies used in the studies. It shows the different clusters, which countries are included in each, and the number of studies that have adopted each. (DOCX 29 KB)

12889_2013_7630_MOESM4_ESM.docx

Additional file 4: Tables of studies used in the review sorted by welfare regime typology. The tables in this file illustrate the data used, the number of countries looked at, health outcome/s, measure of health inequality, typology and main results for each of the main groups; Esping-Andersen, Ferrera, Huber and colleagues, Korpi and Palme and Regional comparisons. (DOCX 45 KB)

12889_2013_7630_MOESM5_ESM.docx

Additional file 5: Tables of studies used in the review sorted by Institutional approach. The tables in this file illustrate the different institutional approaches used in the studies. They are sorted by type of policy (pension benefits, economic assistance and unemployment benefits, family benefits, and access to health care), the data used, health outcome/s, measure of health inequality, and main results for each of the main groups. (DOCX 24 KB)

12889_2013_7630_MOESM6_ESM.docx

Additional file 6: Tables of studies used in the review sorted by Expenditure approach. The tables in this file illustrate the two Expenditure approaches used in the studies. They are sorted by type of spending (health spending or social spending), the data used, health outcome/s, measure of health inequality, and main results for each of the main groups. (DOCX 20 KB)

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Three Worlds of Welfare State Research

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This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there are increasing opportunities for intellectual exchange across these clusters. Research in this important empirical sub field of comparative politics has been pluralistic and eclectic, both methodologically and theoretically. Overall, this stance has yielded substantial benefits.

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Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research pp 7627–7631 Cite as

Welfare State(s)

  • Vanna Gonzales 2  
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  • First Online: 01 January 2024

Enabling state ; Social safety nets ; Welfare networks

The welfare state constitutes a set of institutions, socioeconomic policies, and cultural attitudes that determine the dimensions and strength of a society’s social safety net. At its core, it signifies government responsibility for social protection and thus represents the degree of public intervention deemed relevant to ensure that “neither bad luck nor economic distress nor social disadvantage determine (totally) the life chances of citizens” (Briggs 2000 : 16).

Description

The welfare state reflects a commitment to justice , solidarity , and equity , core values sanctioned and legitimized by the state through an assemblage of policies, laws, and programs designed to pool risk. While social security, social assistance, and health care have traditionally been viewed as the three main pillars of the welfare state, it includes income transfer schemes, cash assistance, and direct and indirect services across a variety...

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Lessons From The European Welfare State

Sluggish growth will continue until governments adopt policies that reduce regulation and encourage private investment.

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Europe has become the model for how democratic capitalism can give way to the welfare state. Following a surge of market-driven growth after World War II, there was a rise across the continent in income redistribution and regulations intended to protect workers and consumers, and to achieve “fairness.” From the 1960s onward, high tax rates and heavy regulations slowed economic growth. And many welfare state programs became roadblocks to economic progress by resisting reforms and prolonging the current European recession. This essay neglects the immigration problem that complicates many of these issues, but immigration does not change the need for real economic adjustment.

Current economic problems and prospects differ substantially among European nations. At one extreme is Greece, where promises for pensions and other benefits have made the cost of producing uncompetitive. (An index rates Greece's competitive position at 3.8 on a scale of 10.) Greek workers can retire on full pension after working 37 years, so a worker who starts at 18 can retire with full pension at 55. Most other European countries use 65 as the age for retirement with full pension.

Recently, the Greek Parliament finally agreed to reduce pension costs as part of its preparation for the next round of negotiations. Greece has much experience with agreeing to adjustments that it is unable to achieve in practice. To remain in the European Monetary Union, Greece has been required to adopt “austerity” budgets that would require it to run a large budget surplus and retire outstanding debt. Greece promises but cannot achieve balanced budgets or reduce its enormous debt. France and Italy are not as far along to disaster as Greece, but their welfare systems are also difficult to reduce to regain competitiveness.

The European Central Bank (ECB) managed the 2008 shock to the world economy relatively well. It could permit its exchange rate to depreciate. It was less successful in 2011 and after in managing the weakness in its peripheral members.  This shock was internal. The ECB could not adjust exchange rates. It tried low interest rates as a way of fostering recovery and expanding activity. When that failed, it lowered rates further, trying negative rates as a stimulus to bank loan expansion. Oddly, the ECB does not look across the border to the Swiss National Bank, which uses negative interest rates to slow expansion and deter Europeans from seeking a safe harbor for their money in Switzerland. If the Swiss negative rates slow the Swiss economy, as they do, the ECB policy cannot expect negative rates to generate expansion no matter how much lower (more negative) the ECB moves.

The main lesson for the ECB is an old one. Monetary policy cannot overcome real, structural problems. Spain and Ireland showed that EU members can restore growth most effectively by making the painful real changes that adjust real exchange rates. My experience in speaking last year to a group of EU policy officials is that most don’t like that message and don’t want to hear it. Sluggish growth will continue until EU officials adopt policies that encourage private investment, as Keynes recognized in the General Theory. Real investment is missing in the EU and the United States.

Europe’s current problems have an important lesson for the United States. Some of the candidates in the 2016 presidential race offer more welfare state benefits as a remedy for current voter malaise. The promise is that the way to make everyone better off is by taxing high incomes and distributing more to others. That’s the route that many in Europe took. Instead of the promised happy outcome, much of Europe got slow growth and high unemployment and an ever greater need to restore competitiveness by reducing the expanded welfare state.

Greece is just one extreme example of this. But that country is a tiny part of the European Union. France and Italy are much larger than Greece, so they are far more important in making the Union succeed or fail. Youth unemployment rates are nearly 50 percent in Greece, 39 percent in Italy, and 25 percent in France. This means that trained and ambitious youngsters are emigrating in record numbers.

About 25 years ago, political leaders in each of these countries hoped that by joining a common currency system with their neighbors, they could increase growth and reduce some economic instability by eliminating currency devaluations. The members agreed to call the new common currency the euro and to maintain a fixed exchange rate with all members of the group.

German Chancellor Kohl was less interested in the economic benefits. He wanted the common currency to bind France and Germany close together as a way of preventing a future European war. The French were pleased to enroll Germany in a multilateral system with majority voting. They wanted the group to reduce Germany’s power and influence.

As directed by Otmar Issing, the new system started well, but it became troubled in the new century. Some of the members adjusted to the world economic crisis of 2008. Others did not. The largest country in the group, Germany, benefitted from the decisions of its previous Social Democratic government to reduce Germany’s unit labor costs. Competitive labor costs enabled the successor government of Chancellor Merkel to increase its exports and grow faster than its neighbors. The German unemployment rate fell from double digits as Germany created an estimated 2.5 million jobs during the Merkel years. The next largest economies, France and Italy, could not find a politically acceptable way to get domestic agreements that reduced their labor costs as Germany had done. They lost competitiveness.

World Bank data suggest that Germany’s economic growth rate has been 50 percent higher than the French rate in recent years. And most of the difference is due to higher German productivity. As a result, French unit labor costs in manufacturing increased 28 percent compared to Germany’s 8 percent. Further, French tax rates are higher than those of Germany and French regulations are more burdensome, especially the outdated 35 hour workweek. French unemployment rates have remained above 10 percent for years.

Any system of fixed exchange rates works well if countries are able to adjust production costs to keep their economies competitive with their neighbors that are members of the system. Instead of trying to find ways to regain competitive position, France wanted the strong countries to buy up its debt. The German government rejected that idea outright. Germany insisted, correctly, that in a fixed exchange rate system, the only way to permanently adjust the system requires compatible means of adjusting relative production costs. It urged France to adopt the structural changes in its labor and other markets that would promote adjustment. They reached no agreement. French President Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Renzi eventually offered programs that might have made their economies more competitive, but the will of interest groups prevailed, so parliaments failed to enact them.

In Federalist 10, James Madison warned of the potential threat to constitutional government posed by “factions,” or interest groups. They ask for more benefits for their members financed by issuing debt. To prevent the debt from raising interest rates, central banks buy the debt by issuing money. A common currency like the euro replaced the member countries’ central banks with a single central bank for the group. But political behavior did not change. Debt continued to grow, and in some debtor countries, it grew rapidly. More frugal countries like Germany and Netherlands have lower debt ratios than troubled countries like Greece, France, Portugal, and Italy.

The United States is the world’s major monetary power, so it remains able to sell its debt at low interest rates. Although candidates mention U.S. budget deficits on occasion, none mention the estimated $90 trillion of unfunded promises mainly for pensions and medical payments that past and current U.S. governments have made. There is no chance that these promises can be kept.

Prime Minister Thatcher often said, “The welfare state will end when they run out of YOUR money.” If she was right, the end for Europe is here. And the lesson for the United States is to adopt less costly policies before debt markets force the change.

As far as Greece goes, the Eurozone leadership is wasting its time and money working with the country. It should suspend Greece from the common currency for five years. That would force Greece to promptly adjust its costs and prices by devaluing its exchange rate. At the end of the five years, the Eurozone should look for evidence that Greece has restored a competitive economy, reduced tax rates, collected taxes, and balanced its budget. Greece should be readmitted only if these changes are in place.

In the meantime, the Eurozone should concentrate on the much more important issue of French and Italian economic reform. Without those reforms in major countries, a fixed exchange rate system cannot produce growth in all its members. With its second and third largest members stagnant, the system will continue to fail

And again, the lesson for the United States is that we will not escape the problems of the welfare state. Candidates may promise Utopian outcomes. Reality is very different.

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Allow me to start this chapter by saying that there is no such thing as the European welfare state. Nevertheless, the welfare state is seen as something thoroughly European in origin, in character and even in terms of identity.

The welfare state is European in origin because its birth is commonly dated to late 19th century Germany. Around 1850, most industrializing capitalist countries already had some version of a modern poor law and had started to introduce labour protection measures (Polanyi [1944] 1957). The Prussian state, moreover, had already started to experiment with social insurance or health funds (see Hennock 2007) in the 1840s. But it was in imperial Germany that Bismarck first introduced mandatory social insurances on a grand scale (Kuhnle and Sander 2010), including sickness insurance in 1883, an industrial accident scheme in 1884 and old age and invalidity insurance in 1889. Other European countries followed, some early on (Austria) while others comparatively late (the Netherlands).

There is no such thing as the European welfare state. Nevertheless, it is European in origin a, character and identity

The welfare state is European in character , because the wide-ranging, interconnected social policies that make up the welfare state reflect the historical European experience of social misery, turmoil, protest, political conflict and war, on the one hand, and reconciliation, cooperation, stability, order, harmony and peace, on the other. The welfare state came to embody a unique answer to the question of how to build and maintain a relatively cohesive economic, social, political and cultural order. Bismarckian social insurances, after all, were not merely pioneered to deal with the social risks of industrial society and to improve workers’ living conditions, but they were principally launched to serve the political goals of state- and nation-building and social order. The very term “welfare state” was popularized, if not invented, by the Archbishop of York, William Temple, who used it in 1941 to contrast this ideal state with the Nazi “warfare state”.

In terms of identity , the welfare state has established itself as an idea and an ideal that Europeans share, a political and social accomplishment highly valued by European publics and an institution to which people attach their (national) identity. This is perhaps more true for the Scandinavian realm than for other areas, and it also holds more weight for some of the welfare state’s programmes than for others. Yet, even in the United Kingdom, where the public entrenchment of the welfare state is arguably much weaker than in Scandinavia, the National Health Service (NHS) is considered to be one of the best in the world and, more importantly, an institution that makes people proud to be British. Tellingly, the NHS beat the Armed Forces, the Royal Family and the BBC in a popularity contest (Ipsos MORI 2014; Quigley 2014).

In the broader European Union context, the catchphrase “European Social Model” has come to refer to something that is uniquely European to the extent that this model is capable of promoting positive-sum solutions to what elsewhere (e.g., in the allegedly not-so-social American model) are considered to be unavoidable trade-offs between sustainable economic growth, on the one hand, and social justice and social cohesion, on the other. Because of its effectiveness, the European Commission champions the developed welfare state as an example to mimic for other countries and at the supranational European level. In the words of former President of the European Commission Barroso:

Yes, we need to reform our economies and modernise our social protection systems. But an effective social protection system that helps those in need is not an obstacle to prosperity. It is indeed an indispensable element of it. Indeed, it is precisely those European countries with the most effective social protection systems and with the most developed social partnerships, that are among the most successful and competitive economies in the world (Barroso 2012).

The welfare state in Europe represents a huge accomplishment; thriving economies, livable and trustful societies and efficient polities are almost unthinkable without it. Yet, at the same time, the welfare state is under siege as it faces a number of demographic, economic, financial and political challenges.

I will proceed in this chapter by first shortly portraying three views that often pop up in debates on the welfare state and that are meant to challenge its very raison d”être . They contain important truths, but only tell part of the story. Next, I discuss what the welfare state does and argue that it is primarily about providing protection against social risks and much less about redistributing income. I then describe how welfare states in Europe differ enormously in how well they protect their populations and in how they address income inequality. Welfare states are not static, and in the last two decades or so, many have reoriented their social protection systems towards labour market activation and social investments so as to deal with the challenges of new social risks and ageing. This has been a pan-European and—in an economic and social sense—a relatively advantageous development, but one which the financial crisis and the economic recession that followed it are now seriously jeopardizing. The formidable task welfare states are facing is to find yet again new ways to continue to provide social protection while promoting sustainable economic growth (see Begg et al. 2015).

Three half-truths about the welfare state

Three beliefs often pop up when people talk about the welfare state. One view frequently heard is that it is a very expensive, inefficient human invention that we, at best, can just about afford, but that most likely is depleting our resources and is, in any case, unmaintainable in the long run. The welfare state is making us all worse off because of the prohibitively high level of contributions and taxes it requires. In other words, although the welfare state might perhaps be valued as in some way useful from some social point of view, overall it is primarily an economic burden. Indeed, the welfare state obviously requires large financial resources to function and has built-in economic disincentives, but this is only one side of it. The other part is that the welfare state—on the demand-side via consumption smoothing—greatly contributes to macroeconomic stability and—on the supply-side through investments in human capital (e.g., education and training) and social services—stimulates economic development. Recent research even finds that welfare state generosity does not create work disincentives; on the contrary, it increases employment commitment (Van der Wel and Halvorsen 2015).

The second belief recurrently voiced is that the welfare state is in crisis or is itself causing a crisis in the economy or in politics. The intriguing observation to make here is that the welfare state has almost always been considered to be in crisis or to be causing one. In 1975, the trilateral commission (Crozier et al. 1975) published a report on the worldwide overload and ungovernability crisis of democracy. This was allegedly caused, among other things, by the continuously rising expectations and demands of citizens on the welfare state. The oil crises of the 1970s were argued to have led to a fiscal and legitimacy crisis of the welfare state. Some predicted that the welfare state caused economic collapse because its redistributive policies undermined the profitability of capital and hence impeded investment. Others highlighted that the expansionary spending of the welfare state was crowding out private investment.

Some people consider the welfare state a kind of Robin Hood institution that steals from the rich and gives to the poor

More recently, predictions of crisis and collapse are coming from analyses that highlight the negative impact on the welfare state of increasing interdependence, internationalization and globalization. Social systems are believed to be in need of dismantling for reasons of international competitiveness. Governments are caught in a “race to the bottom”. On top of this, intensified European integration is argued to favour “social tourism” and “social dumping”, phenomena that are undermining national welfare states, and European solutions still lag behind. In spite of these alarming stories, however, the welfare state not only clearly survived several crises (Starke et al. 2013), but has continued to function. In fact, it has performed its functions of social protection surprisingly well given the extreme challenges it has been facing (see Van Kersbergen and Vis 2014: chapters 5 and 10).

The final idea that frequently crops up is that the welfare state is fundamentally a kind of “Robin Hood” institution that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. This perspective obviously arouses strong sentiments as some worship Robin Hood and his Merry Men as heroes of the poor, while others see him and his helpers as villains who should be detained and rendered harmless. The Robin Hood metaphor, in a sense, is invoked to underpin the two other views: the welfare state as a millstone around the neck of the economy and the welfare state in crisis and as the cause of crises. Although such ideas obviously capture parts of the reality of welfare states in Europe, they merely tell part of the story and, hence, show an incomplete truth.

Robin Hood versus the Piggy Bank

So, what is the whole story about the welfare state? What is the welfare state and what does it do? Let me focus on the Robin Hood issue. Is the welfare state really a kind of Robin Hood institution that steals from the rich and gives to the poor? The first thing to note here is that although income redistribution is an aspect of many social policy programmes that make up the welfare state, especially those tailored to fight poverty, it is not the reason why the welfare state exists. The welfare state is a collection of institutionalized policies and entitlements as social rights, which in various ways offer protection for all who might experience economic and social hardship. The welfare state is, therefore, foremost about the pooling and redistribution of social risks, particularly the risk of income loss, and not (necessarily) about income redistribution. The metaphor best depicting this essential function of the welfare state, as Barr (2001) has so imaginatively suggested, is the piggy bank: a device to help people insure against social risks and to assist people in redistributing resources over the life cycle. Importantly, welfare states differ enormously in how well their piggy banks protect citizens against social (labour market and life cycle) risks and how much their Robin Hoods redistribute income.

The second thing to stress in this context is that there is no such thing as the welfare state. Welfare states differ quite dramatically in the size of the budgets devoted to social protection and redistribution, with net social spending (2011, after taxes, tax breaks and social benefits are taken into account) ranging from a low 14.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Estonia to a high 31.3% of GDP in France (OECD 2013). Moreover, welfare states not only contrast sharply in cash, they also diverge distinctly in kind: they are qualitatively very different in how they organize and finance their systems of social protection and how they design and how they spend their social budgets. These differences, most importantly, have huge consequences for the functioning of the labour market, for the organization of people’s working and family life and for the level of social protection and income equality societies foster and people enjoy.

In many welfare states, Robin Hood plays a less prominent role than the piggy bank for the straightforward reason that the systems are simply not designed to redistribute income (even though they all do to some extent). In fact, in the conservative and southern welfare states (see below) income redistribution was a secondary goal and occurs as a side-effect if it enters social policy at all. Only in the social democratic universalist welfare states does Robin Hood redistribute large sums of money, not only to the poor, but also, most strikingly, to the middle class. What welfare states do is to offer protection against social risks (old age, unemployment, disability, etc.) and provide income maintenance. Most income redistribution is actually horizontal, that is, intrapersonal over the life course and within income groups, and much less from the rich to the poor. Only in the lean liberal welfare states is Robin Hood supposed to play the superhero of the poor because here many of the social provisions exclusively cater to the poor. However, recent research (Levell et al. 2015) shows that even in the liberal welfare states (e.g., the United Kingdom), more than half of income redistribution is of the intrapersonal kind and over the life-course: people put money in the piggy bank during their active working life and smash it when they are in need later in life.

Different kinds of welfare states in Europe

The kind and quality of social rights that the welfare state guarantees entail one dimension that has to be taken into account to understand the extent to which individuals and families can uphold a decent life in case of sickness, unemployment or old age, independent of their performance on the labour market. How strict are the eligibility rules for a benefit? How long should one have contributed to a scheme before one is entitled to a transfer or service? Does a social benefit depend on one’s former income and does qualification depend on a means test? This quality of benefits and services is high if it is relatively easy to qualify for them, for example, when the required contribution period is short and when there are no means tests. Similarly, a social right is of high quality when a benefit’s replacement rate is high (how much of a wage or salary is replaced by a benefit) and its duration is long.

The other dimension that one needs to look at to evaluate the quality of social protection is to what extent the welfare state alters, reproduces or even reinforces social and economic stratification. As Esping-Andersen (1990, 55) has famously argued, welfare states “are key institutions in the structuring of class and the social order”, and depending on their institutional set-up, they have widely divergent effects on social structure. Welfare states “may be equally large or comprehensive, but with entirely different effects on social structure”, and they come in different shapes: “One may cultivate hierarchy and status, another dualisms, and a third universalism. Each case will produce its own unique fabric of social solidarity” (58). Esping-Andersen distinguished three types of welfare states: liberal, social democratic and conservative.

Esping-Andersen distinguished three types of welfare states: liberal, social democratic and conservative

The liberal welfare state is market-oriented, and public provisions for income maintenance and relief mainly cater to the poor. Most people in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom (with the notable exception of health care) are able to find social protection in the private market. Low and flat rate tax-financed benefits characterize the system, and access to benefits is restrictive because benefits are means-tested. Private social insurance is encouraged via tax exemptions and allowances, which favour the middle class and the rich. The liberal welfare state is also service-lean, and transfers are modest to mean. The inequalities generated in the private market are not countered in this system, and those who can afford it are well-protected, whereas others come to depend on means tested assistance. This model came under political pressure early on (Reagan, Thatcher), and austerity politics became the dominant response to many of the challenges the welfare state faces.

The social democratic welfare state grounds social rights in citizenship or residence and, hence, to a substantial extent, does away with status differentials. This model, as found in the Nordic countries, is generally also tax-financed, but access to social provisions is much more open, and benefits and services are more generous than in the liberal model. The model provides social services for all without strict qualifying conditions. The role of the market in service and benefit provision is played down. Several of the Nordic countries went through performance crises in the 1990s, but managed to recover from this by essentially maintaining their path of development, stressing maximum labour force participation, flexible but protected labour markets and social investment.

Welfare state models differ substantially in how much they are commited to spend

The conservative or corporatist welfare state model features Bismarckian social insurance programmes that are differentiated and segmented along occupational and status distinctions. In addition, in countries such as Germany and Austria, state employees (civil servants) receive privileged treatment in social insurance, particularly pensions. In this model, people, particularly men, qualify for a provision or benefit to the extent that they have contributed to a social scheme. Employment record is decisive for acquiring social rights. Employees pay contributions to social insurance funds and receive benefits that are earnings-related and depend on contribution period. This model is typically social service-lean and transfer-heavy.

These features of the conservative system imply that the existing stratification system and income inequality are largely left untouched and, in fact, tend to magnify rather than moderate existing differences in status and income. The employed, especially those working for the state, are well-protected insiders, whereas those without a strong attachment to the labour market are outsiders whose social protection depends on their family. The model came under strain in the 1980s and 1990s because many of its qualities (early exit schemes, passivity of benefits, dualism in protection, gender bias) precluded the necessary growth of labour market participation, especially of women.

Some argue that there is a specifically southern or Mediterranean fourth model found in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The model shares many features of the conservative one, but is characterized by much more fragmented and particularistic social insurances, a rather one-sided stress on pensions (although less so in Spain), a very pronounced insider-outsider and gendered structure of the labour market, an even more pronounced role of the (extended) family in the state-market-family mix of social protection, an under-developed social assistance system and clientelism in the allocation of benefits and jobs in the public sector. This model came under pressure because of problems of low (formal) labour force participation, wide social protection gaps, a weak state and, hence, suboptimal tax capacity (the quintessential example would be Greece, see Petmesidou and Guillén 2015).

These welfare state models, in short, differ substantially in how much they are committed to spend, but what matters most for social outcomes, such as social protection and inequality, is on what specific social purposes that money is spent, how the programmes are organized, taxed and financed and how transfer- or service-oriented they are.

The generosity of welfare states

One way of gauging the relative quality of what the welfare state does and how well it does this is by looking at the welfare state’s generosity. Generosity depends on the replacement rates of key social benefits, the duration of such benefits, the kinds of demands people have to meet in order to qualify for a benefit, the number of waiting days included in the rules and how many people are covered by the social scheme. Generosity captures the extent to which social services and benefits have been institutionalized as social rights that allow people to “maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market” (Esping-Andersen 1990, 22).

In chart 1, countries are ranked (high to low) according to their generosity index in 1980. The higher the score on this index, the more generous the systems are. As can be seen from the table, in 1980, the Swedish social democratic welfare state was the most generous and the Australian liberal welfare state was the most tight-fisted. One can also quite easily recognize Esping-Andersen’s classification of welfare states. In 1980, the most generous welfare states were the social democratic countries (except Finland), closely followed by the conservative countries. Most liberal welfare states (Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Australia) are found at the bottom of chart 1. In 1980, Italy’s welfare state looked more like a liberal than a conservative European welfare model, whereas the liberal United Kingdom was closer to Austria and Germany than to any of the liberal welfare states.

Chart 1 also shows that in terms of generosity, the neat picture of the three worlds of welfare states has become somewhat blurred in 2010. The liberal welfare states have remained quite clearly distinctive in the relatively humble levels of bigheartedness of their welfare states. Interestingly, the United Kingdom seems to have become much more of a liberal welfare state than it used to be, dropping from place 9 in 1980 to 12 in 2010. Some of the social democratic states have become much less generous too. Sweden, the world’s generosity champion in 1980, fell 5 places and ended at rank 6 in 2010, while Denmark descended from place 3 to 8. Three continental European countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and France) have surpassed the social democratic welfare states (except Norway) in generosity in 2010. The biggest change is found in Ireland, where the welfare state generosity index jumps from 25.8 to 35.3, locating this country at place 5, also above Sweden and Denmark. Even though the precise ranking of welfare states and the composition of the models have changed, it is obvious that there are still clear differences in the quality of welfare states as measured by the generosity index.

The welfare state and income redistribution

The generosity index cannot inform us precisely about the redistributive features of the welfare states, but it seems reasonable to suspect that the more generous systems are also more egalitarian. And, indeed, there is a reasonably strong negative correlation between how generous welfare states are and how much inequality they produce (Jensen and Van Kersbergen 2016). The OECD (2014) has published interesting data on how welfare states redistribute and which income groups profit relatively most from social benefits. It turns out that welfare states differ enormously in which income groups they most privilege. The southern European welfare states transfer a much higher proportion of social benefits to the highest income group than to the lowest one. Portugal leads this group of southern European countries, where the lowest income group receives clearly less than what the top receives: 11% of all cash benefits goes to the bottom 20% earners, whereas 40% goes to the top 20%. Portugal also has one of the highest levels of inequality.

There are two important causes for this phenomenon. First, most transfers in these countries are simply not meant to help the poor exclusively, but rather are to cover the social risks of all social strata. Second, benefits for the retired, disabled and unemployed are often linked to contribution period and are earnings-related, so that relatively more goes to the well-off than to the poor. This is especially true for pensions, and the southern—and some of the continental European—countries are typically pension states: Italy, Greece and Portugal, but also France, roughly spend between 13% and 16% of GDP to pensions, two to three times as much as the social democratic, liberal and some of the conservative welfare states (Switzerland and the Netherlands), which typically spend between 3.6% and 7.4% of GDP on pensions. This means that income redistribution in the pension-heavy welfare states is not from the rich to the poor, but primarily from one period in life to another. In other words, inequalities produced during working life are directly reproduced, rather than moderated, in retirement.

This redistributive pattern contrasts sharply with the liberal and social democratic welfare states, in which the bottom group receives relatively more than the top. Australia, for instance, clearly targets the poor as over 42% of total benefits goes to the bottom and only 3.8% goes to the top. However, given that Australia’s level of inequality is close to that of Portugal, it is also clear that there is no one-on-one relationship between the allocation of public benefits to different income groups and inequality. The main reason is that the relatively high level of transfers to the bottom income group can be an effect of two different things: either a high level of overall spending, as in the Nordic countries, or targeting through means testing (i.e., offering usually minimum benefits exclusively to those who have no other means), as is the case in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

Another thing to take into account is that much of the effect of the welfare state on inequality depends on how social benefits and services are financed and allocated. The universalist and comprehensive tax-financed systems that are characteristic of the social democratic model turn out to be much more redistributive than the targeted systems, even if there is no progressivity in taxation (see Rothstein 1998). In a way, this is counterintuitive because these welfare states are very generous to the middle class and do not target the poor. In fact, higher income groups disproportionally profit from social services, especially health care and education. Hence, one would expect a fully means-tested system, in which a disproportional proportion of benefits goes to the poor, to be much more redistributive. However, means-tested systems tend to be tight-fisted, whereas social democratic universalist systems distribute much larger sums of money, and as a result, the latter come out as much more redistributive than the more targeted and means-tested ones, a phenomenon called the paradox of redistribution (Korpi and Palme 1998).

The effect of the welfare state on inequality depends on how social benefits and services are financed and allocated

The redistributive effect of the welfare state can be directly measured by the percentage difference through transfers and taxes between inequality in market income and inequality of disposable income. Income redistribution is the outcome of public spending on cash benefits, how much the tax-benefit system targets the poor and the progressivity of the tax system. Adema et al. (2014) have shown that all welfare states redistribute and lower inequality, at least to some extent, but that the cross-national differences in the welfare states’ redistributive effects are large, varying from a decline in inequality of 20% to 30% in the liberal welfare states to 45% to 47% in Ireland, Slovenia, Finland, Belgium and Hungary. Interestingly enough, the countries with the lowest income inequality, namely the social democratic welfare states of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, are not among the countries with the top redistributive tax-benefit systems. This, first of all, reflects the fact that these countries have relatively equal market income distributions in the first place. In addition, the picture is somewhat distorted because the redistributive impact of the Nordic countries’ extensive social services financed via taxation are not taken into account (Adema et al. 2014, 19).

Welfare state adaptation and social investment

Welfare states and welfare state models are not static institutions; on the contrary, they are continuously updated and adapted to constantly changing social, economic and political circumstances, including shocks, such as the financial crisis and the economic recession that followed in its wake. As documented in more detail elsewhere (Van Kersbergen and Hemerijck 2012; see extensively Hemerijck 2013), all welfare state models have undergone significant changes in the main areas relevant to social policies.

In macroeconomic policy, countries have converged around a policy framework centred on economic stability, hard currencies, low inflation, sound budgets and debt reduction. The introduction of Economic and Monetary Union turned monetary policy into a fixed parameter for policy reform in other fields. Most countries have also responded to internationalization with wage restraint, usually backed by broad social pacts between employers, unions and the government. Everywhere, there has been a reorientation of labour market policy towards activation with a view to maximize labour market participation. All welfare states have increased work incentives, although not all have managed to the same extent to accompany this stick with the carrot of human capital investment.

Another general trend has been labour market deregulation, particularly decreasing job protection, in order to make labour markets more flexible and to create opportunities for labour market outsiders. There are, however, large differences between countries in that only some (e.g., Denmark and the Netherlands) complemented the flexibilization of labour markets with measures that extend social protection to vulnerable groups, establishing systems of “flexicurity”. More generally, the trend in social insurance has been to focus more on labour market (re-)integration than on income maintenance. Retrenchment of unemployment protection has been part of the flexibility venture almost everywhere, although minimum income schemes have been introduced or improved in a number of countries where these were lacking.

Welfare states are continuously updated and adapted to constantly changing circumstances, including the financial crisis and the economic recession

Everywhere, reforms have been introduced to make pension systems sustainable under conditions of low or declining fertility and increasing life expectancy (see European Commission 2015). Measures include increasing the retirement age, limiting early exit, introducing occupational and private pillars on top of the public schemes and redefining the actuarial links between contributions and benefits. Many countries have also increased their efforts to assist people in their attempts to reconcile work and family, for example, by extending child care and pre-school facilities and other services as well as parental leave provisions.

In Europe, policy reforms in welfare states of various kinds have often taken inspiration from the idea of social investment. The basic conviction is that social policies should not just passively compensate for social mishap, but should more proactively be used to prevent labour market inactivity, to adopt a life course perspective (e.g., life-long learning) and to promote human capital so as to stimulate both equality and economic growth. Increasing the capacity of individuals over the life course to remain in employment not only provides a high level of social security, but also greatly enhances the long-term financial sustainability of the welfare state. It is in this sense that the term “investment” must be taken quite literally: an investment in human capital will yield great returns in terms of money saved on passive benefits and money earned from taxes and contributions. Investments in children are particularly promising, because they help smooth inequalities in (cognitive) abilities and health and prevent an accumulation of disadvantages over the life course, which would otherwise increase demands on passive welfare (Kvist 2015). The social investment strategy hence aims at developing policies that “help to simultaneously widen the tax-base, increase fertility, fight poverty and inequality, or improve the financial sustainability of certain key programmes such as pension schemes” (Morel et al. 2009, 10). The European Commission has promoted social investment as the key policy framework to guide member states in their social policy reforms (European Commission 2013) and to reach the goals of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The impact of crisis and recession

Before the financial crisis hit, social investment was rapidly becoming the foundation of a new policy paradigm in most if not all welfare states as well as at the European Union level. One ingredient of the social investment strategy, namely employment and activation policies, was adopted everywhere and has helped to increase labour force participation, especially among women and older men. The economic recession, however, has greatly amplified the financial pressure on the welfare state, both by multiplying the number of people on benefits and by decreasing the financial contributions for social policy. Virtually everywhere this has led governments to increase their austerity policy efforts and to retrench on social entitlements so as to help rebalance the public budget. Even though in discourse the social investment agenda still seems intact, particularly at the European level, it has also become increasingly clear that social investment policies are particularly vulnerable to cuts in the short run, precisely because social investments yield returns only in the longer run, while cost containment is a necessity now.

Let me take as an example the social democratic welfare states, in which the social investment path has been followed far longer than anywhere else and where it has become an intrinsic component of the welfare state paradigm. If one, for example, compares public expenditures, one finds that the social democratic welfare states spend 3-4% of GDP more than the conservative, liberal and southern European welfare states on key social investment programmes (education, family benefits and active labour market programmes). The effects are evident in the use of public services, where the social democratic welfare states stand out in the large number of children they enrol in pre-education and children and adults in education (schools, training institutions, etc.). The public provision of childcare, education, work-life reconciliation initiatives and active employment policies not only provide people with the skills to work, but they also free up time to participate in the labour market and generate jobs. As a result, labour market participation rates of men and women are highest in the social democratic welfare states. Finally, as is well known, income inequality and poverty rates are lowest in the social democratic countries.

Recent trends, however, seem to indicate a change of direction even in the social democratic social investment approach, namely a move away from universalism and inclusive social investment, with rising selectivity in social policy as an effect of tighter eligibility criteria, more targeting and privatization. Similarly, focusing on outcomes, there are signs of rising inequality and poverty as an effect of direct retrenchment and policy drift, that is, not updating social policies to new needs (see Van Kersbergen and Kraft 2016). The point to stress here is that if the social democratic welfare states are finding it already increasingly difficult to uphold their allegiance to the social investment oriented welfare state, then it is highly likely that other types of welfare states will find it close to impossible to remain committed to the social investment path they had started to follow before the financial crisis.

The financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent recession caused all welfare states to experience similar problems, including rising unemployment, reduced credibility of the banking sector, falling exports and rising budget deficits. Because of the problem similarity, governments initially responded in roughly similar ways. The immediate response was to massively support the financial sector and to protect demand by continuing existing social policies and introducing temporary measures to stimulate demand. But bailing out banks, recapitalizing them and a host of other measures to save the financial sector added up to a very high bill. And on top of that came rising social expenditures and decreasing taxes and contributions, which put public budgets under extreme financial pressure.

The recession caused all welfare states to experience rising unemployment, reduced credibility of the banking sector, falling exports and rising budget deficits

Interestingly enough, the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed in its wake, for obvious reasons, were not blamed on the welfare state, at least not initially. In fact, the welfare state was celebrated for how it cushioned the harmful effects of the crisis as its automatic stabilizers did exactly what they were meant to do: automatically stabilize demand and protect people from hardship. But then something happened, which Mark Blyth (2013) has labelled “the greatest bait and switch in modern history”: although the fiscal crisis in European welfare states (except Greece) was a consequence of the financial crisis, it became progressively portrayed as its cause. Because states took responsibility for the massive private debt that banks had caused by socializing it as public debt, the banking crisis was turned into a sovereign debt crisis, as if it had been the welfare states, rather than the banks, which had caused the predicament. Thus, the problem became reformulated as one of excessive (welfare) state spending and public debt, which had to be battled by a severe politics of austerity in order to solve the financial crisis and stimulate the economy.

As a result, the political conviction everywhere became that the costly initial response to the crisis and the recession was not sustainable in the long run because it was causing deficit spending to rise dramatically. This ushered in a period of austerity with a view to restore balanced budgets and contain public debt. Governments realized, or in some cases were reminded by the financial markets, that deficit spending had reached its limits. Consequently, the politics of reform increasingly came to revolve around the question of who was to pay for what, when and how. In other words, the outcome of these political struggles determines who will carry the heavy burden of financial and economic recovery. The crucial political choice virtually everywhere seems to be founded on the conviction that a swift return to a balanced budget is the only sensible route to economic recovery and that drastic retrenchment is the only means to achieve that goal. Governments have already agreed on significant public spending cuts, which add up to drastic reforms that particularly hurt social investment policies and induce new distributional conflicts, although more so in some countries than in others.

Let me highlight two issues by way of a conclusion. On the one hand, there has not been a major onslaught against the welfare state in the immediate wake of the financial crisis. On the other hand, there have been increasingly drastic spending cuts that seem to undermine the social investment path that welfare states had chosen to follow. During the last twenty 20 years or so, welfare states have been continually adjusting to new economic and social demands, and governments have pursued, albeit with considerable variation, apparently well-adapted and innovative social policies, such as social investment. But under increasing stress, especially in the wake of large budget deficits and pressures from financial markets, it is not evident that core social programs can be protected through reform; they may become victims of the pending distributional battles or of further policy drift.

Welfare states have been remarkably flexible and capable in their adjustment to their permanently changing environments. Their core social arrangements remain highly popular so that any attempt at a radical overhaul continues to meet public resistance. Yet, severe budgetary problems, the unpredictable but threatening responses of financial markets and the real economic consequences of the financial crisis not only pressure for further reform, but possibly undermine the political capacity to implement those reforms needed to guarantee the continued protection of people against social risks that the welfare state has so far offered.

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research on welfare state

A Menace to National Welfare Reconsidered, Part 1: Reviewing the Costs of Erosion

  • Shae Ruppert, Jonathan Coppess , Will Fathauer, and Marin Skidmore
  • Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
  • University of Illinois

In 1935, as dust storms carried topsoil from the Oklahoma panhandle to the Atlantic Ocean, Congress declared soil erosion to be a “menace to national welfare” and took tentative first legislative steps to address the problem. American agriculture was being consumed by the Great Depression; in the southern Great Plains, multi-year drought and catastrophic soil erosion known as the Dust Bowl compounded the misery (P.L. 74-46 ; Coppess, 2024 ; farmdoc daily , November 7, 2019 ; NRCS, History ). Nearly ninety years removed, soil erosion remains a challenge central to agricultural resiliency and the overall health of farm fields. It is historically among farming’s most prominent natural resource and environmental challenges. Eroding soils are also associated with lost nutrients and pesticides, resulting in water quality degradation. Combined, the losses contribute to damage that extends far beyond the farm gate (see e.g., Bullington, June 19, 2023 ; farmdoc daily , February 8, 2024 ; INLRS, 2023 Biennial Report ; Illinois Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency, December 1, 2023 ; Jones, December 11, 2023 ; Haynes, January 5, 2024 ; Atkins, January 28, 2024 ). This article opens a series reviewing research on soil erosion and conservation with a focus on the economic implications and policy analysis.

In 1995, a group of researchers led by David Pimentel published a groundbreaking paper on the environmental and economic costs of soil erosion that also projected the benefits of conservation; as of this writing, the paper has been cited over 3,800 times (Pimentel et al., 1995 ; Derpsch, et al., 2024 ). The researchers used complex modeling of soil erosion at an average rate of 6.88 tons/acre/year and estimated the cost of erosion at $79.35/acre/year in 1992 dollars. Twenty-five years later, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) released the most recent 5-year report on soil erosion as part of the 2017 National Resources Inventory (NRI), finding that U.S. cropland was losing an average of 4.63 tons of soil per acre per year. The 2017 NRI reported that 2.67 t/ac/yr. was estimated due to sheet and rill (water) erosion and 1.96 t/ac/yr. due to wind erosion (USDA-NRCS, September 2020 ). Despite significant improvements, the current level of erosion remains a concern; soil regenerates slowly and soil erosion wastes natural resources, costing both the farmer and society.

For the farmer, soil erosion’s economic losses begin with the risk of lost productivity but extend to diminished resiliency and sustainability. Farmers can generally seek to overcome or compensate for the productivity losses from soil erosion by increasing the application of expensive inputs such as fertilizer, but those costs are also increasing significantly. Adjusted for inflation and the lower soil erosion estimates in the 2017 NRI, a national average cost of erosion based on the Pimentel study would be $113.92 per acre today, 75% ($85.44/acre) of it borne by the farmer directly. For society, lost productivity on farms increases risk to the food system that may require mitigation in multiple forms. More directly, society also bears the costs of cleaning up soil erosion and lost nutrients. The Pimentel study concluded that 25% ($28.48/acre) of the erosion cost is charged to society.

The Pimentel study coincided with a reawakening about soil erosion. A substantial expansion of acres under production in the 1970s and early 1980s led to a second economic crisis and problematic increases in soil erosion. In the Food Security Act of 1985, Congress enacted landmark soil conservation policy that included the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and conservation compliance. The study preceded major changes in farm policy enacted in the 1996 Farm Bill, including decoupling farm program payments and enactment of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) (see e.g., Coppess, 2024). The 2017 NRI reported a 35% decrease in overall soil loss within the last four decades, attributing reductions to valuable conservation efforts and adoption of more sustainable farming practices. Figure 1 illustrates the national average soil erosion rates for cultivated cropland in each NRI from 1982 to 2017 from water (sheet and rill) and wind (USDA-NRCS, September 2020 ). Notably, much of the erosion reduction was accomplished from 1982 to 1997 and water erosion rates have increased since 1997.

research on welfare state

Not all fields in all areas suffer erosion at the same rate in any given year, however, nor will the same field experience the same rates of erosion each year. As with all aspects of farming, much about soil erosion depends on the weather—hot, dry conditions for wind erosion or heavy precipitation events for sheet and rill erosion—and field conditions. Given these realities, the range of soil losses found by researchers can be understood as the risk of soil erosion in any given field and year .

Figure 2 illustrates a single range of soil erosion with conventional tillage compiled from eight different soil erosion research articles (see e.g., Fu, Chen and McCool, 2006; Zhang and Garbrecht, 2002; Lindstrom et al., 1998; Gaynor and Findley, 1995; Seta et al., 1993; Blevins et al., 1990; Mostaghimi, Dillaha and Shanholtz, 1988; McDowell and McGregor, 1984). Even in this limited set of studies, we see a wide range of erosion, from below 1 ton/acre/year to over 7 tons/acre/year.

research on welfare state

The range of erosion is a measure of risk to the field’s productivity.  The soil that erodes first and most is topsoil which is the most fertile part, containing much of the organic matter and nutrients necessary for crop growth (see e.g., Garcia-Ruiz et al., 2015 ). The stock of critical nutrients accumulates during years of no or low erosion but can be lost quickly in a high erosion year. Each crop year, soil erosion risks lower crop yields, not only in that year but for multiple crop years and yields into the future.

To understand the cost of soil erosion, we need to understand the impact on corn yields and the estimated economic and energy costs. The Pimentel study estimated yield losses beginning with 7.7% for corn, while other researchers found almost 8.8% corn yield loss at lower levels of erosion (15 cm of topsoil removed) and 19.6% at high rates of erosion (30cm soil removed) using a potential yield index model on 45 soils from 16 soil associations in Iowa (Craft, Cruse, and Miller, 1992 ). Similar research for Illinois soils (eight sites, seven soil series) found yield losses that ranged from 5% to 13% and as high as 24%; the highest yield losses were found for those fields with “root restricting subsoils” or soils with fragipans or clay pans that inhibited root growth and penetration (Olson and Nizeyimana, 1988 ).

Figure 3 makes an initial application of these research results to illustrate the potential yield loss risk due to soil erosion. Using the national average corn yield as the status quo scenario, we model how a soil erosion event in 2000 translates into potential yield impacts for the next twenty years. Each line below no change (light blue line) represents the increased risk of yield loss projected as a five-year average based on severity of soil erosion. While not a definitive measure of yield loss, this application of research provides a measure of potentially foregone yield. Each bushel actually lost cannot be sold for revenue and is a significant cost.

research on welfare state

Finally, note that the research applied in Figure 3 did not include lost nutrients based on the presumption that farmers compensate for lost nutrients with fertilizer applications. Farmers can, to some degree, reduce the risk of yield losses from soil erosion with fertilizers, but that also costs the farmer and may not offset yield losses completely. As all farmers know painfully well, fertilizer costs have increased substantially since the early 1990s and have risen dramatically since 2020, reaching extremely high levels in the fall of 2021. According to the Agricultural Marketing Service, farmer-paid prices for anhydrous ammonia were $487 per ton in 2020 and $746 per ton by July 2021. The price exceeded $1,000 per ton in October 2021 and increased to $1,503 on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, but have fallen below $1,000 per ton in the first few months of 2024 (see e.g., farmdoc daily , August 15, 2023 ; September 12, 2023 ; USDA-AMS, March 7, 2024 ).

Concluding Thoughts

For nearly 90 years, the official policy of the United States has been that soil erosion represents a menace to national welfare. Significant resources have been invested to reduce soil erosion both by many farmers and by society. Research on erosion indicates improvement but with continued concerns and questions whether enough has been invested by policies. For example, research reviewed in this article concluded that the U.S. would need to invest $6.4 billion per year to reduce erosion to a more sustainable rate of less than 0.5 tons per acre per year (Pimentel et al., 1995 ). For context, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which has been the only conservation program in continuous operation since that time, has averaged $1.68 billion each fiscal year (USDA-FSA, Conservation Reserve Program Statistics ) and the national average erosion rate in 2017 was 4.63 tons of soil per acre per year. Not investing sufficiently in soil conservation has costs as well. Adjusted for inflation and reduced average erosion rates, soil erosion could cost $113.92 per acre per year in losses, 75% of which are borne by the farmer. Critical components of the loss estimates are the potential for reduced crop yields, presented here as a risk from soil erosion, and costs of increasingly expensive fertilizers to compensate for erosion’s risk to crop yields.

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Bullington, Jonathan. “Fatal I-55 dust storm puts focus on farmers: ‘We haven’t advanced…but we can.’” The Chicago Tribune , January 23, 2023.  https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/20/i-55-dust-storm-crash-read-the-tribune-investigation/ .

Coppess, Jonathan. Between Soil and Society: Legislative History and Political Development of Farm Bill Conservation Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024). https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496225146/ .

Coppess, J. " Measuring Farm Policy, Part 2: Conservation & A Nutrient Loss Reduction Perspective ." farmdoc daily (14):27, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 8, 2024.

Coppess, J. " The Conservation Question, Part 3: Lessons in Settling Dust ." farmdoc daily (9):210, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, November 7, 2019.

Craft, E. M., R. M. Cruse, and G. A. Miller. “Soil Erosion Effects on Corn Yields Assessed by Potential Yield Index Model.” Soil Science Society of America Journal 56, no. 3 (1992): 878-883. https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2136/sssaj1992.03615995005600030033x .

Derpsch, Rolf, Amir Kassam, Don Reicosky, Theodor Friedrich, Ademir Calegari, Gottlieb Basch, Emilio Gonzalez-Sanchez, and Danilo Rheinheimer dos Santos. “Nature's Laws of Declining Soil Productivity and Conservation Agriculture.” Soil Security 14 (2024): 100127. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667006224000017 .

Fu, Guobin, Shulin Chen, and Donald K. McCool. "Modeling the impacts of no-till practice on soil erosion and sediment yield with RUSLE, SEDD, and ArcView GIS." Soil and tillage research 85, no. 1-2 (2006): 38-49.

García-Ruiz, José M., Santiago Beguería, Estela Nadal-Romero, José C. González-Hidalgo, Noemí Lana-Renault, and Yasmina Sanjuán. “A Meta-analysis of Soil Erosion Rates Across the World.” Geomorphology 239 (2015): 160-173. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X1500149X .

Gaynor, J. D., and W. I. Findlay. Soil and phosphorus loss from conservation and conventional tillage in corn production. Vol. 24, no. 4. American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, 1995.

Haynes, Betty. “Illinois fertilizer loss: 1 step forward, 2 steps back.” Farmprogress.com . January 5, 2024. https://www.farmprogress.com/conservation-and-sustainability/illinois-fertilizer-loss-1-step-forward-2-steps-back- .

Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy Biennial Report 2021-22. (2023). Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and Illinois Department of Agriculture; Springfield, Illinois. University of Illinois Extension; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. https://epa.illinois.gov/topics/water-quality/watershed-management/excess-nutrients/nutrient-loss-reduction-strategy.html .

Jones, Lyndsay. “A report on nutrient pollution in Illinois’ waterways shows more work is needed.” NPRIllinois.com . December 11, 2023. https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2023-12-11/a-report-on-nutrient-pollution-in-illinois-waterways-shows-more-work-is-needed .

Lindstrom, M. J., T. E. Schumacher, N. P. Cogo, and M. L. Blecha. "Tillage effects on water runoff and soil erosion after sod." Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 53, no. 1 (1998): 59-63.

McDowell, L. L., and K. C. McGregor. "Plant nutrient losses in runoff from conservation tillage corn." Soil and Tillage Research 4, no. 1 (1984): 79-91.

Mostaghimi, S., T. A. Dillaha, and V. O. Shanholtz. "Influence of tillage systems and residue levels on runoff, sediment, and phosphorus losses." Transactions of the ASAE 31, no. 1 (1988): 128-0132.

Olson, K. R., and E. Nizeyimana. “Effects of Soil Erosion on Corn Yields of Seven Illinois Soils.” Journal of Production Agriculture 1, no. 1 (1988): 13-19. https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.2134/jpa1988.0013 .

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The Welfare State Prolongs Recessions

Many economic pundits predict that the United States and much of the world is either in a recession or about to enter one, depending upon one’s definition of the term “recession.” This brief essay is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of what causes such economic cycles but rather the proper way to end them as quickly as possible.

Disequilibrium in the Stages of Production

A recession is merely the name for economic dislocations. The stages of production are out of equilibrium. Resources have been allocated to the wrong end products or the wrong stages of production. Consumer preferences have changed, or resources have been allocated by political factors rather than market factors. It really doesn’t matter the cause because the solution is always the same. Get rid of any and all bottlenecks that hinder the reallocation of the factors of production to meet the legitimate desires of the market.

Increasing Private Purchasing Power

There is one huge problem—the welfare state. One, but not all, of the goals of the welfare state is to provide assistance to workers and even companies who find that their cash flow has slowed, as in the case of companies, or even stopped, as in the case of worker layoffs. Government-funded welfare is designed to provide temporary assistance. The problem is that other government outlays are not reduced. No, welfare spending has become “an entitlement” and is always added onto existing spending. This means that the government takes an even-larger bite out of the only economy that matters, the free market economy. Murray N. Rothbard explained that the only spending that matters is “private purchasing power.”

In Making Economic Sense , Rothbard  says , “All government taxation and spending diminishes saving and consumption by genuine producers, for the benefit of a parasitic burden of consumption spending by nonproducers.”

He  elaborates on the subject in his magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market : “In short, strictly, the government’s productivity is not simply zero, but negative, for it has imposed a loss in productivity upon society.”

Since increased government spending must, by definition, reduce “private purchasing power,” welfare spending hinders the ability of the economy to recover just when more “private purchasing power” is needed most. Resources that should have been reallocated to new products and services desired by the public are instead reduced, not increased! Not only that, but welfare payments tend to disincentivize businesses from taking actions needed to redeploy their capital and to reduce labor’s incentive and ability to relocate or acquire new skills.

End Welfare

The solution is simple but difficult to enact. End both corporate and individual welfare. What? Force businesses to close, and throw great portions of the population into destitution? This need not be the case. It is essential that barriers are removed from reallocating capital and labor to where they are needed most urgently.

Furthermore, just as capitalists must be responsible for the financial health of their companies by saving when times are good and always being sensitive to the needs of the market, labor needs to be just as responsible. Both capital and labor need to save for a rainy day. Capital needs to invest continuously into more-productive processes, and labor needs to invest in personal skills that will be needed in the future. Unfortunately, profits from successful companies are taxed away at a high rate, and labor is subject to propaganda that the state will provide. It is a recipe for long, long recessions. Compare the post–World War I Warren Harding depression with the Herbert Hoover/Franklin D. Roosevelt depression of ten years later. Few know about the Harding depression because it ended so quickly. Everyone has heard of the Hoover/Roosevelt Great Depression of the 1930s.

Harding reduced the federal budget. Hoover and Roosevelt increased the federal budget and placed increased regulatory barriers upon the free reallocation of capital and labor. Lord John Maynard Keynes added insult to injury by abandoning Say’s law that production must precede consumption, enshrining the myth of increasing aggregate demand via money printing, deficits be hanged!

The Mises Institute exists solely on voluntary contributions from readers like you. Support our students and faculty in their work for Austrian economics, freedom, and peace.

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Consensus View

Consensus View articles present a comprehensive analysis by an independent and usually multidisciplinary panel of experts that makes specific recommendations on important scientific, publishing or policy issues.

See all article types »

Recommendations for measuring and standardizing light for laboratory mammals to improve welfare and reproducibility in animal research

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected] (RJL); [email protected] (SNP)

Affiliation Centre for Biological Timing, School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Biology Medicine and Health, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

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Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Neurology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Structural and Cellular Biology, Tulane University School of Medicine, Tulane, Louisiana, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Neuroscience, Izmir Institute of Technology, Gülbahçe, Urla, Izmir, Turkey

Affiliation F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center and Department of Neurology, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Center for Life Science, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliation Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliation Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms (SLCR), National Institute of Mental Health, John Edward Porter Neuroscience Research Center, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Affiliation RSPCA, Horsham, West Sussex, United Kingdom

Affiliation Chronobiology Unit, Groningen Institute of Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

Affiliation Department of Neuroscience, Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States of America

Affiliations The Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom, Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands

Affiliation Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America

Affiliations Department of Neuroscience, Peter O’Donnell Jr Brain Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, United States of America, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, United States of America

Affiliation NASA Ames Research Center, Space Biosciences Division, Moffett Field, California, United States of America

Affiliation Laboratory Animal Center and Neuroscience Center, HiLIFE, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Affiliation The Mary Lyon Centre, MRC Harwell, Harwell Campus, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

  •  [ ... ],

Affiliation Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi), Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

  • [ view all ]
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  • Robert J. Lucas, 
  • Annette E. Allen, 
  • George C. Brainard, 
  • Timothy M. Brown, 
  • Robert T. Dauchy, 
  • Altug Didikoglu, 
  • Michael Tri H. Do, 
  • Brianna N. Gaskill, 
  • Samer Hattar, 

PLOS

Published: March 12, 2024

  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535
  • Reader Comments

Fig 1

Light enables vision and exerts widespread effects on physiology and behavior, including regulating circadian rhythms, sleep, hormone synthesis, affective state, and cognitive processes. Appropriate lighting in animal facilities may support welfare and ensure that animals enter experiments in an appropriate physiological and behavioral state. Furthermore, proper consideration of light during experimentation is important both when it is explicitly employed as an independent variable and as a general feature of the environment. This Consensus View discusses metrics to use for the quantification of light appropriate for nonhuman mammals and their application to improve animal welfare and the quality of animal research. It provides methods for measuring these metrics, practical guidance for their implementation in husbandry and experimentation, and quantitative guidance on appropriate light exposure for laboratory mammals. The guidance provided has the potential to improve data quality and contribute to reduction and refinement, helping to ensure more ethical animal use.

Citation: Lucas RJ, Allen AE, Brainard GC, Brown TM, Dauchy RT, Didikoglu A, et al. (2024) Recommendations for measuring and standardizing light for laboratory mammals to improve welfare and reproducibility in animal research. PLoS Biol 22(3): e3002535. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535

This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

Funding: The workshop was supported by awards from UFAW (11-22/23), the Committee International de l-Eclairage, NASA Ames Research Center, and the University of Manchester. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: RJL has received research grant funding from Philips Lighting/Signify and honoraria from Samsung Electronics. GCB has received research grant funding from the Nova Institute, Toshiba Materials Science, Seoul Semiconductor, BIOS, Robern, and PhotoPharmics Inc. He has a current patent (USPTO 7678140 B2) that is licensed by Litebook Company Ltd. He is a paid member of the PhotoPharmics Scientific Advisory Board; has been a paid consultant by Lutron, Inc. and McCullough Hill LLC; and has received honoraria from the Institute for Functional Medicine. BNG has received funding from Tecniplast to travel and present at a symposium. RAH has received research grant funding from Philips Lighting/Signify and is a scientific advisor for the Good Light Group and Chrono@Work. JST is a co-founder and SAB member of Synchronicity Pharma. SNP has received consulting fees from NASA Ames and Sleep Standards.

Abbreviations: CIE, International Committee on Illumination; EDI, equivalent daylightilluminance; ELR, efficacy of luminous radiation; ipRGC, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell; lx, lux; mel, melanopic; MWS, medium-wavelength sensitive; Rho, rhodopic; SI, System International; SWS, short-wavelength sensitive

Introduction

Light has wide-ranging effects on mammalian biology ( Fig 1 ). In addition to supporting vision [ 1 ], light impacts numerous body systems and behavioral and physiological processes, either directly or via its effects on the circadian clock [ 2 ]. All life is exposed to a rhythmically changing cycle of day and night, produced by the rotation of the Earth on its axis. As a result, the light intensity from the sun can vary by around 10 orders of magnitude over the course of the day [ 3 ]. As well as changes in light intensity, at dawn and dusk the spectrum of the light environment also changes with a progressive enrichment of shorter wavelengths due to atmospheric scatter and filtering [ 4 , 5 ]. All animals possess an endogenous circadian clock, enabling them to anticipate predictable changes in their environment. A clock, however, must be set to the correct time: a process termed entrainment. In mammals, light provides the primary time cue for entrainment [ 6 – 8 ], as well as regulating accessory visual responses such as pupil constriction [ 9 ]. Environmental light also modulates light adaptation via retinal circuits to alter visual perception [ 10 , 11 ]. As circadian rhythms regulate processes throughout the body, light exposure has the potential to modulate numerous aspects of physiology and behavior beyond those that directly respond to light [ 12 ].

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As well as mediating vision, light detected by rods, cones, and melanopsin ipRGCs modulate a wide range of different physiological and behavioral responses. Figure redrawn from [ 6 ]. Created with BioRender.com . ipRGC, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.g001

Light also regulates hormone release, including pineal melatonin [ 13 ] and adrenal glucocorticoids [ 14 ]. Sleep and arousal are modulated by light, with nocturnal light exposure in rodents leading to rapid sleep induction [ 15 – 18 ]. A large body of work has shown that light regulates mood and a range of cognitive processes [ 19 – 23 ]. More recently, studies have shown that light can also regulate nociception [ 24 , 25 ]. And finally, the light environment may exert an important role during development, including neonatal aversive behaviors [ 26 , 27 ], retinal vasculature development [ 28 ], ocular growth to ensure emmetropia [ 29 , 30 ], and synapse formation in the brain [ 31 ]. Together, these data illustrate the wide-ranging influence of light on mammalian physiology and behavior. These responses are mediated predominantly by a combination of retinal rods, cones, and melanopsin-expressing intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) ( Fig 1 ).

It follows that lighting is an important consideration in laboratory animal husbandry and experimentation, which should be measured and regulated appropriately, yet ambient light for animals is typically quantified in units (lux) designed for human observers ( Box 1 ). In this Consensus View, we discuss and present the most appropriate metrics for the quantification of light appropriate for nonhuman mammals in husbandry and experimental settings. We also provide guidance on how to measure and implement these metrics in a practical setting.

Box 1. The measurement problem

Light is defined as that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye. The fundamentally species-specific nature of this definition should lead us to question its suitability for other animals and, indeed, it is widely appreciated that some species can use radiation outside the human sensitivity range (ultraviolet) for vision. Perhaps, less widely known is that the human-oriented definition of light is also fundamental to the way in which it is quantified. The System International (SI) is the official system of measurement that forms the basis of scientific, technical, and industrial measurements worldwide and consists of 7 base units of measurement. The SI base unit for light, the candela, quantifies light according to its apparent brightness for a standard human observer. As other commonly used lighting metrics, including lumens and lux (the unit for ambient light intensity), are derivatives of the candela, it follows that almost all light quantification currently assumes a human observer.

Methodology

Building on the success of previous meetings addressing measurement and recommendations for human light exposure [ 2 , 32 ], Robert Lucas and Stuart Peirson convened a third International Workshop on Circadian and Neurophysiological Photometry held in Manchester, United Kingdom in 2023 to address the problem of light measurement in laboratory animal research. Workshop participants (authors of this Consensus View) were identified on the basis of professional and/or academic qualifications (accounting for COVID-19-related travel restrictions), encompassing expertise in retina-driven effects of light in laboratory mammals, animal husbandry, and welfare. The stated goals of the workshop were to: agree on measures to replace illuminance (photopic lux) and human color descriptors in quantifying the laboratory mammal light experience; consider the tools required to make those quantities widely measurable; and provide quantitative recommendations for healthy light exposure for laboratory mammals during the day and at night. We retained a focus on measures of ambient light (rather than local intensity or visual contrast) as the most relevant parameter for animal housing and for influential circadian, neuroendocrine, and neurobehavioral effects of light. We limited our objectives to mammals because non-mammalian vertebrates have a much wider array of photoreceptor types (including extra-retinal photosensitivity), making the task of species-specific light measurement substantially more complex.

Participants were sent a briefing document and a recorded presentation prepared by Lucas and Peirson in advance, which defined the problem of light measurement for animals and described how the recently standardized metrology of α-opic irradiance could be adapted to use across species [ 33 ]. The meeting itself began with topic-relevant presentations from participants and discussion of the α-opic metrology; there was unanimous agreement that α-opic metrology was the best available approach for species-specific measurement. Participants then split into 4 working groups addressing: standardizing measures across species; describing “color”; target values for husbandry; and practical challenges to implementation. Working group discussions were followed by a period of feedback to the whole community for general discussion and consensus. At each stage, time was allowed for all opinions to be voiced and for review of the relevant literature where appropriate. Working groups then devised a plan to draft elements of this Consensus View, which were submitted to the chairs (Lucas and Peirson) for integration into a complete draft that was reviewed, edited, and approved by all workshop participants.

Species-specific quantification of ambient light intensity

The anthropomorphic nature of the candela (and derivatives including lux) arises from the fact that light can vary not only in total energy but also in how that energy is distributed across wavelengths. As humans are not equally sensitive to all wavelengths, simply summing energy across the spectrum cannot predict its apparent brightness. Rather, a spectral efficiency function (known as the photopic sensitivity function or V(λ)), defined according to the wavelength sensitivity of an assay of human perceived brightness, must first be applied ( Fig 2A ). V(λ) peaks at 555 nm, far from the portion of the spectrum to which many animals are most sensitive. Consequently, lights differing in spectral power distribution could have different effective brightness for laboratory animals, even if matched for a human observer. For these reasons, the current use of anthropomorphic metrics is suitable neither for describing light as experienced by these mammals in experimentation or husbandry, nor for agreeing on quantitative guidelines for light exposure.

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( A ) Illuminance in photopic lux is calculated by weighting power across the spectrum according to a function that describes the wavelength sensitivity of perceived brightness in humans (Vλ, blue line). ( B ) A species-specific approach to quantification aims to calculate effective intensity not for a particular visual endpoint, such as perceived brightness, but for each of the 4 types of mammalian retinal photopigment (melanopsin, rod opsin, SWS, and MWS cones). The in vivo spectral sensitivity of these photopigments is defined by their intrinsic wavelength preference and the “pre-receptoral” filter applied by elements of the eye that impact light reaching them (labeled on the schematic of a prototypical mammalian eye). Note species may differ in the complement of photopigments and pre-receptoral filters. ( C ) In vivo spectral weighting functions ( S1 Text ) for each photopigment in mouse shown as a representative (note divergence from Vλ; A ). ( D ) Ambient light intensity for mice may be quantified in 4 α-opic irradiances or α-opic EDIs by applying photoreceptor spectral weighting functions ( C ) to spectral power density measures. Here, values for the representative daylight spectrum (dotted line in A and B ) are set at 100 photopic lux. EDI, equivalent daylight illuminance; MWS, middle-wavelength sensitive; SWS, short-wavelength sensitive.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.g002

In principle, species-specific versions of photopic lux could be created by replacing V(λ) with an equivalent description of spectral sensitivity for perceived brightness for the organism in question. We consider this neither practicable nor necessarily desirable. V(λ) is defined according to psychophysical brightness matching paradigms that would be arduous to reproduce across species. Moreover, it aims to predict only one aspect of visual perception (achromatic brightness) and is not appropriate, even in humans, for circadian, neuroendocrine, and neurobehavioral effects that involve melanopsin and have a more wide-ranging impact on behavior and physiology [ 2 , 34 ]. For these reasons, we considered species-specific versions of a more recently standardized human metrology based on the concept of α-opic irradiance [ 33 ].

The α-opic irradiance metrology ( Box 2 ) was developed to update metrics to account for circadian and related neurophysiological light responses, whose spectral sensitivity is not well approximated by V(λ) even in humans. Wavelength weighting functions in this approach are defined by the spectral sensitivity not of any single visual response (as is the case for V(λ)), but rather of the light sensitive proteins (photopigments) responsible for detecting light. At present, a reasonable simplification holds that mammalian neurophysiological light responses begin with photon absorption by the rod opsin, cone opsin, and melanopsin photopigments found in rod, cone, and ipRGC photoreceptors ( Fig 2B and 2C ). We therefore concentrate here on the problem of quantifying light as experienced by these photoreceptors. The fundamental approach we describe is scalable to additional photopigments as necessary. In particular, the mammalian genome contains 2 additional opsins, Opn3 and Opn5 [ 35 , 36 ], that have been linked to physiological responses [ 37 – 43 ]. OPN5, at least, is capable of acting as a photopigment. At present, their contribution to mammalian photobiology is less thoroughly elucidated than for the other photopigments, and both are expressed also outside of the retina where light filtering by overlying tissue would change wavelength sensitivity ( S1 Text ). As mice lacking rods, cones and melanopsin lack major light responses we therefore argue that concentrating on these best characterized photoreceptors is a reasonable first step to standardizing measurement.

Box 2. α-Opic irradiance/equivalent daylight illuminance

α-Opic irradiance quantifies light according to its effective intensity for each retinal photopigment separately. The method for calculating α-opic irradiance for each of the human photopigments (rhodopsin; short-, medium-, and long-wavelength sensitive cone opsins; and melanopsin) has recently been standardized for humans [ 33 ]. Each of these photopigments absorbs light according to its own spectral sensitivity profile, and hence, each will provide its own distinct response to light intensity for a given spectrum. That means that by integrating the photopigment’s spectral sensitivity profile with the spectral power distribution of incident light, it is possible to calculate an α-opic irradiance ( Eq 1 ) that describes “effective” irradiance experienced for that photoreceptor system ( Fig 2 ). Importantly, the α-opic irradiance concept is readily translatable across species [ 2 ], as it can be calculated for any photopigment in any species for which spectral sensitivity information is available.

research on welfare state

Where: E αβ is the α-opic irradiance (that is, the irradiance for a given photopigment (α) in a given species (β), with units in W/m 2 ); E e , λ ( λ ) is the spectral power distribution measured at the cornea, with units in W/m 2 ; and s αβ ( λ ) is the spectral sensitivity of a given photopigment in a given species, corrected for pre-receptoral filtering.

α-Opic irradiance quantifies light in effective energy per unit area (W/m 2 ). Further processing allows expression in the more intuitive quantity of α-opic equivalent daylight illuminance (EDI). α-Opic EDI describes the quantity of daylight (in photopic lux) required to produce that α-opic irradiance [ 33 ]. To convert α-opic irradiance to α-opic EDI, the α-opic efficacy of luminous radiation (ELR) is first defined by dividing the α-opic irradiance of a standard sunlight spectrum (termed D65) by its illuminance (in photopic lux). α-Opic EDI is then produced by multiplying α-opic irradiance by α-opic ELR ( Eq 2 ).

research on welfare state

The advantage of expressing light in terms of α-opic EDI is that measures across photoreceptors, and indeed species, can be described in terms of a common, ethologically relevant anchor (an amount of daylight). The danger of α-opic EDI is that its unit (lux) is the same as for the currently used human-oriented photopic measurement system (even though it is calculated in a quite different way). To minimize the potential for confusion, we propose that the units for α-opic EDI are modified to incorporate the species and photoreceptor (e.g., lx mouse mel EDI or lx rat short-wavelength sensitive (SWS) EDI).

Note that the α-opic metrology quantifies light according to its effective intensity. It makes no assumptions about the photoreceptor response to that stimulus, which would depend on activation threshold, saturation point, and irradiance response function.

Working group recommendation

Our working group agreed that α-opic irradiance was the most appropriate starting point for quantifying ambient light across mammalian species. For most mammals, it would reduce the spectral power distribution to 4 α-opic quantities (for rhodopsin, S-cone opsin, M-cone opsin, and melanopsin; Fig 2D ), which represent the building blocks for all physiological light responses. As these quantify effective intensity for each photopigment, they represent the minimum number of values required to fully describe the animal’s experience. In principle, the α-opic metrology can also be adapted to measure effective radiance [ 33 ], but our discussions concentrated on its use to describe ambient light intensity (irradiance).

The core of the α-opic irradiance metrology is the photoreceptor-specific spectral efficiency function, s αβ ( λ ) which replaces V(λ) as a method of weighting energy across wavelength. We have provided s αβ ( λ ) functions for common species used in research in S1 Table . Given the central importance of s αβ ( λ ) in this metrology, we also provide a detailed description of the considerations and assumptions adopted in defining these functions and some guidance on extending the α-opic irradiance concept to other species ( S1 Text ). Application of s αβ ( λ ) to spectral power distributions returns effective optical power. A further feature of the α-opic metrology is a method of expressing this in a more familiar quantity. α-Opic EDI describes the quantity of daylight (in photopic lux) required to produce that α-opic irradiance ( Box 2 ). α-Opic EDI thus allows intuitive comparisons of effective light intensity with a natural stimulus (daylight) in familiar units.

In principle, the α-opic measurement system is appropriate for any photoreceptor in any organism for which s αβ ( λ ) can be defined. The advantages of accurate quantification of effective intensity for polychromatic light provided by this measurement system are thus available to any animal (and indeed any photosensitive organism). We restricted the bulk of our discussions to mammals for simplicity as photoreception is often more complex in non-mammals. Amphibia, birds, reptiles, and fish have many (often >10) photopigment classes [ 44 , 45 ], with many of these pigments expressed outside the eye. As light reaching extra-retinal photoreceptors is filtered as it passes through overlying tissues, s αβ ( λ ) for a given extra-retinal photoreceptor may vary according to its location in the body. These complexities mean that a large number of α-opic quantities would be required to capture the full animal experience. Nonetheless, the α-opic system represents an excellent solution for individual or small groups of photoreceptors with defined s αβ ( λ ), which we hope relevant research communities will exploit.

Guidance for measuring α-opic quantities in practice

Although the mathematical procedure for calculating α-opic irradiance is straightforward, simple-to-use light meters working in these units are not widely available at the time of writing. We therefore next considered how these quantities could be measured in practice. The most conceptually straightforward, and accurate, approach is to use an optical spectrometer to measure the spectral power distribution of light (ideally measured at animal eye level) and apply mathematical conversions based upon Eq 1 ( Box 2 ) to calculate α-opic irradiances ( Fig 3 ). To facilitate such a process, we direct the reader to an online tool that will calculate species-specific α-opic irradiances/EDIs from input spectral power distributions based upon the s αβ functions in S1 Table [ 46 ]. Sufficiently accurate spectrophotometers are available at moderate cost (>$500), but although relatively easy to use, may be intimidating for those unfamiliar with quantifying light. Moreover, this approach may become unwieldy when multiple measurements are required; for example, when describing light in various locations within a rack that has cages for animals at different levels.

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( A ) Lx α-opic EDI can be determined from spectral power when measured by an appropriate spectrometer. We provide Toolbox 1 to calculate species-specific metrics from these measurements. ( B ) The most straightforward approach to measuring species-specific α-opic EDIs would be to use a light meter capable of returning light in these values. ( C ) A simple approach would be to estimate α-opic EDIs from measured photopic illuminance (output of lux meter) and knowledge of light source type, for which we provide Toolbox 2 . *NB: this method will be less accurate and still requires the spectral power distribution of the light source to be known. Created with BioRender.com . EDI, equivalent daylight illuminance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.g003

The optimal tool for measuring α-opic irradiances would be a cheap, widely available, light meter that returns the relevant metrics without the user having to “peer beneath the bonnet” to see the underlying calculations. We encourage the lab supply industry to develop these. A simple design could integrate a spectrophotometer with suitable data processing capacity. Alternatively, cheap multichannel light sensors, which are increasingly being applied to measure human α-opic irradiances [ 47 – 49 ], could be recalibrated to measure species-specific metrics [ 46 ]. Examples of commercially available light meters and spectrophotometers are provided in S2 Table .

Mindful of the need to provide an accessible solution based upon currently available technology, a final possibility is to approximate α-opic irradiances using an estimate of spectral power distribution based upon the type of light source and its intensity. To this end, we present a rodent irradiance toolbox [ 2 ] that includes an option to convert photometer-based photopic lux measurements to species-specific units, provided that the spectrum of the illuminant (light source) is known ( Fig 3 ). This is the least accurate of the options, as it assumes that the light reaching the detector has a spectral distribution matching the standard for that type of light source, unaltered by transmission or reflectance. Nevertheless, this option represents an opportunity to describe the animal experience more closely than is achievable using only photopic lux. Importantly, it can also be used to extract α-opic information from published studies, provided that they reported the light source used.

Guidance for using α-opic measurements in animal husbandry and experiments

Having considered how light may be quantified, we turn our attention to direct advice on how this new metrology could be used to improve animal husbandry and experimentation [ 50 ]. Our advice is summarized in Box 3 and elucidated below.

Box 3. Summary of guidance

  • Report α-opic equivalent daylight illuminance (EDI) in all relevant quantities.
  • Work towards agreeing on standardized conditions for your field of study.
  • Quantify and report light in melanopic EDI (units = lx melanopic EDI).
  • Provide a stable 24 h variation in light intensity, with light in the animals’ “night” being <0.1 lx melanopic EDI, and light during the “day” being >10 lx melanopic EDI. Light should be measured in the middle of the cage by pointing the detector in the direction of the major light source (usually upwards) and remembering that this guidance is for the animal and that colored caging may alter the spectrum of the animals’ light exposure. These targets should be reached in species-specific melanopic EDI, but human melanopic EDI is a reasonable approximation for indoor housing of at least some mammalian species under electric light without a strong output at <400 nm.
  • Animals should have the opportunity to escape light, for example, by retreating to a shelter and/or building an enclosed nest, which will require adequate nesting material.
  • Work towards cost and energy effective ways of achieving husbandry targets.
  • Consider lighting that provides lab animals with an approximation of their experience of daylight spectrum.
  • Provide light meters capable of measuring species-specific α-opic quantities.
  • Research and consider the impact of cage colors on animal’s light experience and work towards normalizing animal lighting experience across the rack.

Experimentation

The most complete description of experimental conditions would encompass a complete quantification of light as experienced by the animal. This can be achieved by reporting species-specific α-opic irradiance (or EDI) for each photoreceptor. Ideally, this would be provided in methods sections both for general housing and, where appropriate, experimental conditions.

We were aware that quantifying α-opic irradiances lacks the simplicity of a single metric (c.f. photopic lux). For most lab mammals, 4 α-opic values would be required. This complexity reflects biology, as not only do light-evoked responses typically reflect a weighted output from all photoreceptive systems, but these weightings may differ across physiological outputs, or indeed between species. Applying the α-opic methodology to quantify light as experienced by individual photoreceptors removes those uncertainties and is the only way to capture the animal’s full experience. Moreover, our view is that this approach will itself provide a framework to better describe the photoreceptor origins of the myriad biological effects of light, in an approach that is transferable and comparable between species (and has already happened for humans) [ 2 , 32 ]. Finally, reporting all α-opic measures provides information about both effective irradiance and color.

The resources available (see above) mean that reporting light in 4 dimensions need not be onerous. Nevertheless, we also considered the additional problem of this quantification when it comes to recreating experimental conditions, as it is all but impossible to simultaneously match intensity across 4 α-opic dimensions. This complexity is unavoidable when applying light as an experimental parameter and should be accounted for in study design. For more general applications, however, it would be very helpful to have a single target metric when standardizing measurements or replicating experimental conditions. The answer to the question of which α-opic quantity to adopt for this purpose may differ according to the nature of the experiment, but as a rule of thumb we suggest using melanopic EDI. This choice is partly to retain consistency with the guidance for husbandry (see below). Furthermore, the similarity in spectral sensitivity between melanopsin and rods means that melanopic and rhodopic irradiance are strongly correlated across light sources. Consequently, under most circumstances melanopic irradiance will represent a good approximation of effective intensity for the retinal photoreceptors with lowest (rod) and highest (melanopsin) activation thresholds [ 51 ]. Matching melanopic irradiance may not always be sufficient to normalize experimental conditions (for example, when using lights of very divergent spectral power distribution), but melanopic irradiance will have much greater tolerance than the current practice of matching photopic lux.

Animal husbandry

In the case of laboratory rodent husbandry, we feel that there is sufficient information to go beyond recommending that light is appropriately quantified and documented, and to provide some quantitative recommendations for light exposure. Many factors were considered in determining these, including circadian biology, light preference and aversion, human health and safety, and the animal’s species-specific experience. The guidance we provide is for light as experienced by the animal, and it is important to note that this will be determined not just by the nature of room lighting, but also by rack orientation, cage location within the rack, and cage color [ 52 – 54 ]. For this reason, the figures we give relate to in-cage light measurements, with the detector pointing towards the major light source (and the cage in its position in the rack if appropriate). The guidelines in Box 3 are based on available information, but this evidence base is certainly incomplete, and guidelines may evolve as new data are presented.

The first decision in defining healthy levels of lighting is which metric to provide targets for. As mentioned above, a complete description of the animal experience requires quantification in all α-opic irradiances. We note that there is good evidence that circadian and related neurophysiological responses can be engaged by all photoreceptors in laboratory rodents [ 9 , 55 – 61 ], and hope that the α-opic metrology will facilitate studies aimed at resolving their contribution to factors relevant for husbandry. Nevertheless, given the substantial practical advantages to using a single metric, we provide guidance here in terms of melanopic irradiance. Several factors persuaded us that this quantity could be applied to achieve a reasonable approximation of the animal experience. First, melanopsin-expressing ipRGCs are responsible for important determinants of animal welfare, including circadian photoentrainment and light-induced changes in physiological and behavioral states [ 6 , 8 ]. Secondly, as melanopsin cells have lower sensitivity than rods and comparable sensitivity to cones [ 51 ], as well as a spectral sensitivity in the short to middle wavelength portion of the visible range, any light sufficient to engage melanopsin will also be sufficient to support vision. Furthermore, as outlined above, the similarity in spectral sensitivity between melanopsin and rods means that melanopic irradiance would quantify light with sufficient accuracy across the full range of intensities to which mammals respond.

We propose a further simplification in order to facilitate adoption of guidelines. Although α-opic irradiances are species specific, we suggest using human melanopic irradiance as an acceptable shorthand for general animal husbandry. There is a danger of inaccuracy, but this is largely a problem when using very colored lights. Across a range of broad-spectrum lights (encompassing all commonly used room lighting), the median difference between human and mouse melanopic irradiance is only 7% (range 1% to 19%) ( S3 and S4 Tables). Meanwhile, the increasing availability of light meters capable of measuring human melanopic irradiance makes it easy for any vivarium to compare their lighting against guidance specified in that measurement unit.

Turning to guidelines, we aimed for separate recommendations for the animal’s subjective daytime and night ( Box 3 ). As complete darkness at night is neither natural nor easily achievable, we considered how much light animals might be exposed to at night in nature. The brightest natural light source at night is the moon. Although a bright super-moon can provide 0.3 photopic lux, Kyba and colleagues proposed 0.1 photopic lux as a more realistic value for moonlight [ 62 ]. We therefore suggest that light exposure during the dark phase should not exceed 0.1 lx human melanopic EDI (applying the approximation that photopic illuminance and melanopic EDI are near interchangeable for moonlight). Given the ethological basis for our decision, we believe this is a reasonable target for nighttime lighting for all mammalian species. To achieve these light levels, researchers and animal care staff will need to use dim red lighting for nighttime monitoring or welfare checks (see below).

Determining appropriate levels for daytime light is more complex. In principle, a similarly ethological approach could be taken by recommending that all animals have access to irradiances equivalent to natural daylight during the day. However, achieving such high irradiances is impractical in terms of human user experience and energy usage. We turned therefore to consider the minimum acceptable light exposure during the day. A useful starting point is the minimum intensity required for circadian entrainment. The circadian clock integrates light over long timeframes (tens of minutes [ 63 ]) and we considered a threshold here for a day (light) phase lasting at least several hours. For mice housed with dark nights, this can be very low, with entrainment reported for daytime light as low as 0.06 lx mouse melanopic EDI [ 64 ]. A more realistic target to ensure robust entrainment in all visually intact animals is 0.6 to 6 lx mouse melanopic EDI [ 55 ]. Moreover, several commonly used mouse strains have outer retinal degeneration, and the available evidence is that thresholds for entrainment are higher in animals with dysfunctional outer retina (at 6 lx mouse melanopic EDI [ 65 ]). We therefore suggest a minimum irradiance of 10 lx human melanopic EDI, which is roughly equivalent to the experience of civil twilight [ 5 ] and is much lower than the 250 lx human melanopic EDI recently recommended for humans [ 32 ].

We appreciate that 10 lx melanopic EDI is low compared to daylight and may be insufficient to fully engage the impact of light on physiological/behavioral states. The thresholds for circadian entrainment upon which it is based come from animals whose night phase is totally dark, and the impact of low light exposure in subjective night on thresholds for entrainment is not well established [ 66 ]. Moreover, the characteristics of circadian entrainment may also depend upon daytime light over a wider range [ 67 – 69 ]. Finally, as the threshold of 10 lx melanopic EDI is based on data from mice, it may be less appropriate for more distantly related and/or diurnal species (see e.g., data on diurnal rodents [ 67 , 70 ]). For these reasons, while we believe this value is supported by available evidence (and should be achievable without imposing large increases in energy usage), we stress that it should be viewed as a minimum that may be insufficient to fully normalize the animal experience and, where possible, brighter light is preferable.

We do not provide a recommended upper limit for daytime light intensity. Vivarium lighting will always be dimmer than daylight and thus fall within the range of natural light exposure. Nocturnal rodents typically avoid light when faced with a choice [ 71 ], and we recommend that cages contain a retreat space or shelter [ 72 ] and/or sufficient, suitable nesting material to allow them to do so [ 73 ]. Concerns are often raised about the potential for retinal damage under higher light intensities. For normal pigmented animals, the light intensities required to cause retinal damage are very high (>10,000 photopic lux) [ 74 ]. Where albino animals are used, current evidence suggests light levels should not exceed 20 photopic lux (corresponding to approximately 10 to 20 lx melanopic EDI, depending upon the light source) to avoid retinal damage [ 75 ].

Further considerations

Species-specific consideration of “color”.

Thus far we have considered the challenge of quantifying and regulating ambient light intensity across mammalian species. But the experience of light is also determined by its spectral composition, a property humans perceive as color. In common with the general propensity to design, apply, and report lighting according to human perception, the spectral quality of animal lighting is typically designed with humans in mind. Specifically, by providing “white” light that gives objects a naturalistic color appearance, it aims to create the perceptual qualities of daylight for humans. By contrast, an animal’s experience of this lighting environment may deviate substantially from their experience of natural daylight.

Unlike wavelength, which is a physical property, color is a perceptual quality whose biological origins reflect the differential stimulation across classes of retinal opsins, (principally those expressed by cone photoreceptors [ 76 ]), and subsequent signal processing. As a result, differences in cone spectral sensitivity can substantially skew an animal’s experience of color relative to our own. Most mammals possess just 2 of the 3 cone opsin types found in humans (an S-cone opsin and an M/L-cone opsin), limiting them to a single dimension of color discrimination [ 77 , 78 ]. Moreover, in mice and several other rodent species, the spectral sensitivity of these 2 cone types (and corresponding capacity for color discrimination [ 79 – 84 ]) is substantially short-wavelength shifted relative to their human counterparts, with the S-opsin showing maximal sensitivity at wavelengths that are largely undetectable to humans (peak sensitivity approximately 360 nm) [ 85 ]. As a result, most common light sources, which lack energy in this part of the spectrum (particularly commonly used white LEDs), are expected to appear as extremely long-wavelength biased compared to daylight (“yellow” by human analogy) for most mammals and to dramatically limit any capacity for color discrimination. The α-opic metrology allows quantification of this property ( Fig 4 ).

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( A ) Spectral power distribution of a standard 4000K white LED (100 photopic lux) and the corresponding α-opic EDIs for human and mouse. Lower panel shows peak sensitivities of mouse and human cone photoreceptors. Note the very low S-cone-opic EDI for mice due to the lack of energy at wavelengths <400 nm (>100-times less than for natural daylight of the same photopic illuminance). ( B ) To describe the impact of this difference for color experience in mice, we created a nominal spectral power distribution that recreates, in humans, the relative S- and M-cone-opic EDIs experienced by mice under light source in ( A ). ( C ) We then compared the x,y chromaticities (plotted on CIE 1931 2° color space) and IES-TM30 color-rendering metrics for color-fidelity (R f ) and gamut (R g ) for a standard human observer of the original white LED (from A ) and the nominal light recreating the mouse experience (from B ). Note the strong yellow shift and dramatic reduction in color rendering properties of the mouse-matched spectrum. ( D – F ) Spectral power densities (left), α-opic EDIs (top right) for human (gray), and mouse (magenta); and associated color properties (as C ; bottom right) of 3 additional white light sources, which provide progressively better approximations of natural daylight for mice. Panels, respectively, represent a standard 4000K fluorescent source ( D ), a high-quality 6500K “daylight” fluorescent ( E ), and a violet-pumped LED source ( F ), modeled based on commercially available devices. EDI, equivalent daylight illuminance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.g004

The importance of light’s spectral properties for mammalian health, physiology, and behavior is incompletely understood. Across non-mammalian species, there are many demonstrations that appropriate spectral content is critical for key behaviors including navigation, hunting, and mating [ 86 – 91 ]. Similarly, there is evidence that the short-wavelength-shifted spectral discrimination capacity of mice and other rodents is important for foraging, social/territorial, and/or defensive behaviors [ 92 – 95 ]. There is also growing evidence that color signals contribute to the circadian control of physiology and behavior by providing information about shifts in the spectral composition of ambient light occurring during twilight [ 96 ]. Indeed, it is now apparent that, in mice, spectral signals originating from cones influence neural activity within the master circadian clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus) and can modulate the timing and robustness of behavioral and physiological rhythms [ 5 , 97 ]. Finally, there are emerging data of a protective role of “violet” (360 to 400 nm) light against the development of myopia in mice and other species via, as yet incompletely resolved, mechanisms [ 29 , 30 , 41 , 98 – 101 ].

In sum, while there is much we do not know about the biological importance of the spectrum of light, there is reason to suspect that failure to provide an approximation of the animal’s experience of natural light could alter species-specific behaviors, circadian function, and aspects of development. It is generally accepted that any restrictions on the extent to which animals can satisfy their physiological or ethological needs should be kept to a minimum [ 102 ], so there is a clear ethical requirement to approximate natural light, besides the likely benefits for animal welfare (see below) and data quality. In addition to encouraging more research in this area, we note that there may be opportunities to better recreate the animal’s experience of the spectral properties of natural daylight (including considerations around the spectral transmission of cages/enclosures where relevant). In the case of mice and many other commonly used laboratory rodents, this could be simply achieved without compromising the experience of humans in the same environment by choosing fluorescent or LED lighting with greater energy in short wavelength portions (390 to 420 nm) of the visible spectrum ( Fig 4E and 4F ). A violet pumped LED would provide such a lighting solution, providing a “white-light” perception for both humans and rodents that approaches the perception of natural sunlight for most mammals ( Fig 4F ).

Animal welfare implications

The quantitative guidance we presented on animal husbandry represents the first specification targeting the animal experience of light. To our knowledge, the animal welfare implications of inappropriate light quality in vivarium housing are yet to be specifically evaluated. There is, however, a body of experimental literature on the effects of ocular light exposure on specific elements of health and wellbeing, which can be used to identify potential risks to animal welfare.

Disruption of circadian rhythms is known to be detrimental to health in humans and may contribute to a range of different diseases [ 103 , 104 ]. Given that rodents are used to model the effects of circadian disruption in humans, to help understand deleterious effects on humans and how these might be ameliorated, it is not surprising that light also affects animal welfare [ 105 – 107 ]. There is a large body of evidence on the effects of circadian disruption on animal health. In rodents, exposure to non-24 h light/dark cycles reduced lifespan, and this effect was abolished in constant darkness [ 108 , 109 ]. The health consequences of circadian disruption have been studied in rodents under many different experimental conditions [ 110 , 111 ]. For example, exposure to light at night impairs activity/rest cycles and blunts glucocorticoid rhythms [ 112 ], affects metabolism [ 113 ] and immune function [ 114 ], and increases anxiety and depression-like behaviors in a wavelength-dependent manner [ 115 , 116 ]. Aberrant light/dark cycles also impair learning, memory, and mood in mice [ 21 ]. Even conditions that produce a misalignment of circadian phase by a few hours can alter cardiometabolic function, sleep, and recognition memory [ 117 , 118 ].

Together, these data provide strong evidence that disrupting circadian rhythms via inappropriate light exposure can have detrimental effects on animal health and welfare. Exposure to short-wavelength-enriched light during the daytime may provide benefits for circadian, metabolic, and endocrine regulation [ 69 ], though more data are needed regarding the optimum intensity and spectral composition of normal vivarium lighting.

Messaging to stakeholders and effecting change

The concept of redefining how light is measured and reported (and, ultimately, provided) will be new to many stakeholders. Reporting light parameters in detail, beyond basic information on light/dark phases, will also likely be a novel approach. Given that there have been issues with the impact of the widely supported, and promoted, ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines on reporting animal use [ 119 ], it is likely that considerable effort will have to be put into communicating with stakeholders and persuading them to report lighting appropriately. One important determinant of success will be cost/benefit calculations. On the cost side, we hope that methods presented here will make species-specific light measurement accessible for many and that appropriate light meters will become increasingly available. That will be important if the new measurement system is to be accessible to those without specialist knowledge (or interest) in light. Turning to benefits, it is important to highlight what could be gained by quantifying and specifying light according to the animal’s experience, contributing to animal welfare and hence, the quality of scientific output.

Scientific researchers

When light is itself an experimental parameter, the benefits of proper quantification should be self-evident. “White” lights matched for photopic lux can vary by as much as 3-fold in mouse melanopic irradiance. The difference becomes larger for “colored” lighting; for example, mouse melanopic irradiance of a “blue” 435 nm light could be 60 or 2,500 times greater than that of a “green” or “red” light with the same photopic lux ( Fig 5A ). Thus, the animal experience of different lights matched in inappropriate quantities could be very divergent, leading to inappropriate scientific conclusions and failures of replication.

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( A ) Illustration of the inaccuracy of measuring light in photopic lux. Broad-band (white) light sources of equal photopic lux give very different mouse melanopic EDI values depending upon their spectral content. This difference becomes even larger for narrow-band (colored) light sources (note log scale). For example, blue LEDs can give higher melanopic EDI values, whereas red LEDs give much lower values. ( B ) Appropriate α-opic measurements should be considered for routine housing and husbandry, as inappropriate light exposure may disrupt daily variations in behavioral and physiological state, with consequences for many aspects of biology. These metrics will also facilitate recreation of experimental conditions for any study in which light is an independent variable, including vision and circadian research. Finally, α-opic EDI measurements represent a first step in standardizing experimental conditions for any work in which light can impact the outcome, including common behavioral tests of anxiety, mood, learning and memory, and pain/aversion. Created with BioRender.com . EDI, equivalent daylight illuminance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.g005

There are many experiments in which light is an aspect of the wider experimental conditions that could influence the outcome. Given the evidence that light can have wide-ranging effects on behavioral and physiological states, standardizing light intensity in units appropriate for the species could improve reproducibility in several ways ( Fig 5B ).

The most wide-ranging way in which appropriate light measurement could improve scientific outcomes is in standardizing the measurement of housing conditions and avoiding bad practice. As described above, light has profound effects on physiology and behavior. Exposure to inappropriate light in the “night” phase can impact numerous aspects of biology, from activity/rest cycles to hormone levels and cognitive function [ 113 , 120 ]. Light levels also vary dramatically across cage racks [ 52 ], and animals housed under different lighting conditions will start from a different baseline. By adhering to the quantitative guidance provided here for animal husbandry prior to and during experimentation, researchers can avoid bad practices (e.g., excessive light at night) that have the potential to impact their scientific data. The α-opic EDI metrology we propose also enables researchers to avoid systematic biases in their experimental design. For example, defining variations in lighting that occur across cage racks or within rooms allow treatment groups to be appropriately counterbalanced [ 121 ]. Analysis of data in this manner also offers a powerful approach to identify how light—measured in species-appropriate units—affects commonly measured experimental outcomes.

Light is also critical for visual function, and appropriate light measurement is essential for any studies where visual stimuli are used, whether this involves pattern recognition, visual acuity, movement detection, changes in brightness, or visually guided behaviors. Differences in the tuning of color discrimination across species could also be relevant for many assays of animal behavior and cognition that involve a visual component (for example, novel object recognition). In many such cases, the choice of cue and lighting properties could substantially impact the extent to which the relevant visual cues are distinguishable to the animal. This may alter the sensitivity and reliability of the test in question (for example, by varying across a “green–red” axis rather than the “violet–green” axis, across which mice can discriminate color). The use of α-opic metrics provides a simple way of capturing and standardizing these aspects of the animal experience.

Properly quantifying light would improve reproducibility in behavioral studies, including tests of anxiety, mood, and learning and memory [ 122 ]. Many tests of anxiety in rodents depend upon photophobia, such as the open field test, elevated plus maze, and light/dark box [ 71 ]. Moreover, as light has been shown to modulate mood, learning, and memory [ 19 , 21 ], differences in lighting between studies may provide an experimental confound. Recent data showing that pain is affected by light [ 24 , 25 ] are relevant not only to pain research, but also to any condition where animals undergo invasive procedures where light may influence an animal’s subsequent recovery. The use of α-opic metrics should help reproducibility of scientific data both within and between labs.

Building designers and facility managers

Quantitative specifications provide the substrate for engineering. We hope that defining what animals need will precipitate innovative solutions to achieve it. These could lead to cost savings and improvements in energy efficiency, but one particularly attractive target will be resolving potential conflicts between the needs of humans and lab animals occupying the same environment. One example of such an application would be adoption of lighting that approximates the experience of daylight for both species ( Fig 4 ). Another example with strong potential is to facilitate reverse light/dark cycles. This can be an important strategy for allowing data collection during a nocturnal rodent’s active phase [ 123 ], but imposes a conflict between the lighting needs of animals and their human caretakers. Genuinely reversed light/dark cycles, in facilities where this has not been specifically designed and facilitated, can be difficult to achieve and are easily undermined by even very low, or fleeting, exposures to light. The animal-centric guidance provided here can be applied to employing “deep red” light to resolve this conflict. Thus, for example, applying melanopic irradiance reveals that >680 nm task/room lighting (appearing red to humans), may be as bright as 300 photopic lux without exceeding the limit for nocturnal light exposure (<0.1 lx melanopic EDI) in lab mammals proposed here. Continuous dim red safety lighting is not recommended, however, as such chronic nocturnal light exposure may affect circadian physiology [ 124 ].

How should those involved in the design and management of facilities proceed? Due to the highly regulated environment necessary in animal facilities, energy usage—and the associated costs—are a major concern. Many facilities are justifiably moving to more energy efficient LEDs to replace older lighting systems. Where LED lighting is used, we would recommend adoption of lighting systems that can be made to approximate daylight for both humans and lab animals. For rodents, this may involve the future capacity to use violet-pumped white LEDs, which would be necessary to approximate daylight in species with S-cones sensitive to ultraviolet light. While there are little empirical data on the behavioral consequences of such daylight approximation, selection of lighting systems that are flexible and accommodate tunable spectral output may be desirable.

Conclusions

The current practice of measuring light using units designed against a human observer leaves this important environmental parameter poorly controlled in animal husbandry and experimentation. Light sources that appear similar to humans may appear quite different to animals. It is important to be aware of the potential consequences for animal welfare, reduction and refinement, and data quality, if lighting is inappropriate. Measuring light in species-specific α-opic EDI provides a workable approach to quantifying the full animal experience of light. The newly standardized melanopic EDI unit represents the best currently available single measure for ambient light intensity across mammalian species. We provide targets for light exposure in melanopic EDI in husbandry in the animal’s daytime and night. Until it is technically and practically feasible for these targets to be achieved, it is essential that light levels and quality are effectively reported in publications.

Supporting information

S1 text. further considerations and assumptions in defining s αβ ( λ )..

Extended description of the approach used to define spectral efficiency functions s αβ ( λ ), and the particular challenge of doing so for OPN3 and OPN5.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.s001

S1 Table. α-opic sensitivity functions for retinal photopigments in some common laboratory species.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.s002

S2 Table. A selection of light meters and spectrometers suitable for α-opic EDI measurement.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.s003

S3 Table. Comparison of mouse α-opic EDIs across 42 broad-spectrum CIE standard white light sources matched for 100 human photopic lx.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.s004

S4 Table. Comparison of mouse α-opic EDIs across 9 monochromatic LED light sources matched for 100 human photopic lx.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002535.s005

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Luc Schlangen (Technical University of Eindhoven) for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Assuring A Child Welfare Competent Mental Health Workforce - An Overview of the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training (NTI)

The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (The National Council) and the Innovations Institute have partnered to develop a four-part series titled Youth Behavioral Health Continuum Services and Supports Learning Series which focuses on the role of multiple sectors in addressing comprehensive youth behavioral health and well-being. The information below is for Webinar #1.

The challenges faced by adopted, foster, and guardianship families due to traumatic life experiences, early losses and multiple moves can lead to developmental, health and behavioral challenges, and serious emotional disturbance (SED) all impacting family stability. It's crucial for child welfare and mental health professionals to enhance their skills and understanding of the adoption journey, as it benefits everyone involved as the transition from foster care to permanent adoption is a critical life event. Implementing adoption-competent education, resources, and support services plays a vital role in strengthening and stabilizing families.

This interactive and engaging webinar highlights these challenges and the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training Initiative (NTI) which aims to provide the foundational knowledge, skills, and understanding necessary to improve assessment and intervention, ultimately promoting family stability and the well-being of children and youth in foster care, adoptive, and guardianship relationships.

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    The welfare state reflects a commitment to justice, solidarity, and equity, core values sanctioned and legitimized by the state through an assemblage of policies, laws, and programs designed to pool risk.While social security, social assistance, and health care have traditionally been viewed as the three main pillars of the welfare state, it includes income transfer schemes, cash assistance ...

  19. Welfare state

    Social expenditure as % of GDP (). A welfare state is a form of government in which the state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions ...

  20. The emergence of the idea of 'the welfare state' in British political

    This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean.

  21. Lessons From The European Welfare State

    Research. Throughout our over one-hundred-year history, our work has directly led to policies that have produced greater freedom, democracy, and opportunity in the United States and the world. ... And many welfare state programs became roadblocks to economic progress by resisting reforms and prolonging the current European recession. This essay ...

  22. Welfare states and environmental states: a comparative analysis

    The influence of class interests, so central to welfare state research, is virtually absent in the environmental field. Rather, there is evidence that environmental concerns are more prevalent among more educated and affluent groups. Thus, mounting climate-change problems foster new interests to pressure for collective, and increasingly ...

  23. The Welfare State in Europe

    Recent research even finds that welfare state generosity does not create work disincentives; on the contrary, it increases employment commitment (Van der Wel and Halvorsen 2015). The second belief recurrently voiced is that the welfare state is in crisis or is itself causing a crisis in the economy or in politics. The intriguing observation to ...

  24. What's Wrong With The U.S. Welfare State?

    Instead, attendance went up. getty. Here are two surprising facts about welfare and poverty in the United States: (1) we are spending an enormous amount of money on people at the bottom of the ...

  25. A Menace to National Welfare Reconsidered, Part 1: Reviewing the Costs

    Shae Ruppert, Jonathan Coppess, Will Fathauer, and Marin Skidmore - Jonathan Coppess - For nearly 90 years, the official policy of the United States has been that soil erosion represents a menace to national welfare. Significant resources have been invested to reduce soil erosion both by many farmers and by society, but soil erosion remains a challenge central to agricultural resiliency and ...

  26. The Welfare State Prolongs Recessions

    The Welfare State Prolongs Recessions. Many economic pundits predict that the United States and much of the world is either in a recession or about to enter one, depending upon one's definition of the term "recession.". This brief essay is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of what causes such economic cycles but rather the ...

  27. Recommendations for measuring and standardizing light for laboratory

    Lighting conditions for laboratory mammals is currently set according to the sensitivity of human vision. This Consensus View defines alternative 'animal-centric' metrics and provides guidance for their application to standardize experimental conditions, improve animal welfare and the quality of animal research.

  28. Assuring A Child Welfare Competent Mental Health Workforce

    The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (The National Council) and the Innovations Institute have partnered to develop a four-part series titled Youth Behavioral Health Continuum Services and Supports Learning Series which focuses on the role of multiple sectors in addressing comprehensive youth behavioral health ...