Esping-Andersen travels South. Einige kritische Anmerkungen zur vergleichenden Wohlfahrtsregimeforschung

Abstract

Abstract

Some Critical Remarks on the Comparative Research on Welfare. Until recently, comparative studies of welfare regimes have mainly been confined to a handful of countries in the North; thus, research on welfare regimes in the South is a rather new field. The following article presents a critical summary of the major advances and shortcomings of recent studies on welfare regimes in the South, focussing mainly on Latin American examples. Despite efforts to de-centre the comparative research agenda, analyses of welfare regimes outside the OECD-world still suffer from a euro-centric bias. In the context of a proliferation of typologies based on varieties of Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare capitalism, central aspects concerning the political reproduction of social inequality, i.e. power and authority relations, have so far been neglected. In discussing the central characteristics of exclusive and fragmented welfare regimes in Latin America, this article comes to some suggestions which would help to intensify the dialogue between welfare and post-transitional studies and refocus the research agenda on the central topic of redistribution.