Convergence, Divergence or Persistence of Welfare Policy Institutions in the Enlarged European Union?

Have mature Western and transitional Eastern European welfare states of the enlarged EU converged in the last two decades? If so, in which direction? Are there “convergence clubs” and in which ways do welfare regimes constrain possible convergent developments? Several theoretical perspectives engage with these questions, offering at least three basic causes of convergence. It is expected to occur as a response to similar demographic, economic and international pressures; as a result of the increasing emphasis on social policy at the EU level; and as a result of the eastern enlargement of the EU. Most of the approaches suggest a race to the bottom of social standards, yet empirical evidence is only partial and ambivalent so far. This paper seeks to analyze welfare state convergence from a macro-comparative perspective. It tracks the development of important parameters of core welfare state institutions in the enlarged EU by looking at several trends. Examining 26 European countries from 1995-2007, the analysis focuses on generosity and eligibility criteria of the benefits in two different core fields of income maintenance, unemployment benefits and minimum pensions. It builds on new data on standardized institutional variables which facilitates analyzing different welfare programs for two different family types separately. More importantly, the data also permits including all ten Central and Eastern European new member states in a time series analysis – a longstanding deficit in quantitative comparative welfare state research due to a lack of data. We draw on different measures of convergence for assessing welfare policy dynamics. This way, the paper prepares the ground for more sophisticated analyses on causes and consequences of welfare state development in the enlarged EU.