In the chapters that follow, we analyse the ‘real worlds’ of welfare capitalism through the lens provided by socio-economic panel data from the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Furthermore, we analyse those worlds of welfare capitalism through the evidence of these panels alone. We resist the temptation to supplement our panel data with further information compiled from elsewhere.

There is of course much evidence from other sources which could be woven into these analyses. But the selection from among all that material, and the choice between methods for incorporating it, would inevitably be matters on which people's judgments would naturally differ. We have few illusions that our conclusions will be utterly uncontroversial. But we hope that by sticking tightly to the panel data we can avoid gratuitously introducing other sorts of controversy. Whether or not it is the whole story, ours is – if not quite indisputably, anyway minimally disputably – the story that these panel data tell.

The panel studies upon which we draw have, of course, been organized by other scholars, with rather different issues and emphases in mind. For many of the propositions of interest to us, therefore, the tests we concoct using these panel data are inevitably not the very best imaginable. All we would care to claim is that the indicators we identify are the best that can be found within the data sets before us.