Having set out the basic theories lying behind corporatist regimes in section 3.3, we now wish to test those theories against the actual experience of one exemplary corporatist welfare regime – that of Germany. The basic institutional structure of the German welfare regime has already been set out in section 4.3. Our task here is to test its performance, in pursuit of its chosen strategies and goals.

Once again, this test will primarily be against the corporatist welfare regime's own internal standards of success. But there is a comparative element in this assessment as well. We want not only to know whether the corporatist welfare regime does what it says it will do in the way it says it will do it; we also want to know whether it does those things better than the other welfare regimes under review. Hence we will once again look at the performance of corporatist Germany alongside that of the liberal United States and the social democratic Netherlands.

Mapping corporatist welfare strategy

The crux of the corporatist welfare strategy is to integrate individuals into households through marriage, and households into the economy through the paid employment of the household's head. Through strong social integration on both those fronts, the corporatist regime hopes to achieve its ultimate aim of a stable social and economic order.

Here, as elsewhere, not all of those concepts are easily captured by the sorts of variables available to us in the panel data.