Gender analyses recognize the political choices being made about how social relations between women and men are translated into policy, including the role the state will play in supporting family life and whether this will manifest itself in the direct provision of care or the provision of cash benefits to enable people to buy care. The answers to these questions have, in practice, considerable implications for the labour market participation of women. The high female labour market participation rates in the Nordic countries have partly been generated by a willingness of the state to pay women to carry out caring tasks which elsewhere have to be carried out by (generally female) parents and relatives themselves. While this approach has benefits for women, it has not significantly influenced the overall gender division of labour (Irving, 2015). A second point of significance that has emerged from the retypologization of welfare states, has added further empirical evidence to the argument that women’s political participation is crucial to the development of social policies in women’s interests. Early on, Siaroff’s (1994) typology of welfare states identified a group of ‘late female mobilisation’ countries (Southern European nations plus Ireland), which were otherwise dissimilar but lacked gender equality across a range of indicators. This critique of Esping-Andersen also draws attention to the importance of familist ideologies in influencing the politics of social security and determining the expectations embedded within it, and more recently has had particular pertinence for analyses of welfare politics in Mediterranean Europe and in East Asia (Sung and Pascall, 2014; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2017). Esping-Andersen’s original sample only featured Italy and Japan from these regions.
The need for geographical extension is taken up in the following section, but it is also important to highlight that it is not just the range of countries which has prompted elaboration of welfare regime theory. One of the core elements of the feminist critique of mainstream welfare regime theory is that it privileges class over other structures of inequality. The absence of other dimensions of social relations is significant in comprehending the distributive drivers of welfare states, and crucial to understanding both development and change in social policy. The work of Ginsburg (1992) and Williams (1995) addressed these gaps, but as Williams has since argued (2016), the methodological and theoretical strengths of comparative analysis in foregrounding political forces came at the cost of neglecting much of the critical social policy scholarship around gender and race that had emerged in the 1980s. Thus, notwithstanding the gender critique of welfare regime theory, Williams argues (2016, p. 632) that there has been a lack of ‘any systematic engagement with the multiple social relations of gender and race in themselves or in their relation to class’. Analyses and typologization of ‘migration regimes’ (Castles, 1995; see also Castles and Miller, 1993, 2003) have offered an alternative lens through which the social relations of race and ethnicity can be seen in the comparative operation of citizenship, while Green and Janmaat’s (2011) specification of ‘regimes of social cohesion’ explores comparatively more abstract ideas of societal diversity and commonality. Williams (2015) has elsewhere argued for the need for more ‘conceptual alliances’ in social policy study that connect the political economy both with different ‘organizational settlements’ in welfare provision, and ‘all those social, moral and cultural practices in which the social formation consolidates, fragments and reconstitutes itself – through conceptions of nationhood, citizenship, religion, moral worth, and so on’ (p. 101). This highlights the sociological thinness of regime theory, which also becomes more obvious when its geographical boundaries are stretched.
To return to the geographical concerns, as noted previously, Esping-Andersen’s original work was limited to the study of eighteen OECD countries. Arts and Gelissen’s second review of regime theory (2010) identifies the Mediterranean (or Southern Europe), East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe as places where alternative or ‘emergent’ welfare regimes may be found. To these regions, Gough and Wood (2004) elaborate regime theory to add countries where, broadly speaking, welfare regimes are absent. This extension of regime theory beyond the original OECD worlds, and particularly to countries where political and industrial structures and policy actors are shaped very differently to advanced economies, presents some important tests for regime theory.
Attention has been drawn by those who examined the issues about gender in regime models to the extent to which there is a Roman Catholic and/or Southern European (see also Ferrara, 1996; Siaroff, 1994) approach to the design of social security – alternatively to be seen either as more ‘protective’ of women outside the labour market or as increasing their ‘dependency’ within the family. Ferrara argues that the income maintenance systems of the Southern European countries are fragmented and ineffective and often characterized by ‘clientelism’, in which political patronage is important. His view is supported by others. It is implicit in the regime categorizations developed by Bonoli (1997), Leibfried (1992) and Trifilletti (1999). Castles (2004, p. 179) adds a ‘Southern European’ category to his four-part identification of ‘families’ of nations, stressing the extent to which the states in this category are what he calls pensioners’ welfare states with high levels of state expenditure on middle-aged and older people and low levels of fertility. Hence there is a quite widely identified different ‘world’ in Mediterranean Southern Europe which includes Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. But there may be others among the countries where social policy is more ‘emergent’: Turkey and some of the countries of the Balkan peninsula for example.
A similar theme of family ideologies is raised in the literature on the East Asian countries. Here the theoretical question is whether the highly industrialized Eastern economies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) can be fitted into Esping-Andersen’s typology, at least as later ‘arrivals’. There does seem to be a case for seeing the first three in that list (Singapore and Hong Kong have been more influenced by British colonial policies) as joining Esping-Andersen’s corporatist-statist conservative group. This is a view that has been given support in Ramesh’s (2004) examination of social policy in the last four of the five nations listed in this paragraph. An alternative is to see them as having features which are more specifically ‘Eastern’, which explain areas of limited development. The main argument along these lines has been the suggestion that ‘Confucian’ family ideologies lead to a greater delegation of welfare responsibilities to the family and extended family (Jones, 1993). The problems with this argument are that (a) in any underdeveloped income maintenance system the family will, faute de mieux, have to take on greater responsibilities, and (b) the use of ‘Confucian’ ideologies as a justification for inaction by the political elite cannot be regarded as evidence that political demands can be dampened down in this way, in the absence of other evidence demonstrating popular acceptance of that ideology.
Kwon (1997) seems to take a relatively agnostic stand on these issues. He does, however, point out another dimension in the policy processes in South Korea and Taiwan: the importance of