In what follows, we will exemplify each model of welfare regime by reference to the institutions of one particular country. The United States will be taken to represent the liberal welfare regime, Germany the corporatist and the Netherlands the social democratic.

We will say more to justify each of those ascriptions in the course of this chapter. While the first two will generally be seen as utterly unproblematic, the third might initially seem more problematic. As already explained in chapter 1, the choice of the Netherlands to represent the social democratic welfare regime has been forced upon us by the available data. But that said, we nonetheless think it is not a bad example of the general class, for reasons also given there. Indeed, as argued in section 1.5, these three might be the ‘best cases’ of each regime.

Ideal types and actual countries

Naturally, no particular example can ever embody any particular ideal type perfectly. Each country has its own unique historical experience, its own distinctive economic setting, its own peculiar social dynamics. All of that inevitably overlays, and to some extent confounds, the workings of any theoretical ‘internal logic’ underlying each sort of welfare regime. However, examples are needed, and these are the best that can be found certainly within the limits of the panel data presently available.

Country specialists are inevitably sceptical of all these sorts of classifications.