Investigating Welfare State Change

'The welfare state is a catch-all term which covers a broad range of governmental interventions into social affairs. Over the past decades, social policy scholars have devoted tremendous efforts to analyze those factors that account for cross-national variation and energize the reform trajectories of advanced welfare states. By contrast, the dependent variable has received much less attention: This volume presents a systematic overview of the dependent variable problem in comparative welfare state research. By sketching different approaches on how to conceptualize and measure social policy change and by highlighting their genuine strengths and weaknesses, this volume should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in comparative social policy research.' - Stephan Leibfried, University of Bremen, Germany Contemporary accounts of welfare state change have produced conflicting findings and incompatible theoretical explanations. to a large extent this is due to a 'dependent variable problem' within comparative research, whereby there is insufficient consideration of how to conceptualize, operationalize and measure change.