"Social Models" in a European Comparison

We show that principal component analysis enables the construction of geographic divisions of European social models—Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, Continental, and Postcommunist, that basically follow Esping-Andersen's (1990) welfare regime typology. Instead of Esping-Andersen's criteria of "decommodification" and "stratification," which create typologies of the welfare states—liberal, conservative-corporatist, and social democratic, we compose "social protection" and "commodification" indexes. However, as expected, social-democratic Nordic countries have relatively low "commodification" and high "social protection" scores compared to the other countries. There are some outliers relative to existing typologies—Hungary and the Czech Republic are connected to the Mediterraneans, while Portugal is grouped with the liberal Anglo-Saxons.