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Rezension von:Peter Jaeggi, Krieg ohne Ende. Spätfolgen des Vietnamkriegs.Lenos Verlag, Basel 2016. 298 S., 24,90 EUR

The introduction of innovative macro-measures has been one of the preferred means to account for identified limitations of traditional quantitative approaches in comparative analyses of the welfare state. However, these state-of-the-art indicators are not powerful enough to account for the nuanced politics of 'welfare state change' across mature welfare states as they produce inconsistent - and in several cases contrary - findings on the country level, which also appear to be at odds with the established notion of 'regime dependence' in the historical, case-study literature. Touching upon the limitations of the relevant indicators, we argue that they can at best be seen as crude approximations; this is the root cause for the above asymmetries. The 'dependent variable problem' within the comparative analysis of the welfare state is a problem of data and operational definitions as much as it is a problem of theoretical conceptualization. While the combination of nuanced quantitative and historical findings has become the norm in the broader literature, the article stresses the potential of disaggregated analyses of individual social policy domains within nations and its combination with detailed case-study analyses of social policy making.

Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the 'limits of productivist regimes' (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare. This article develops three distinct types of East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical, employing set-theoretic methods. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, including education, health care, family policy, old-age pensions, public housing, and passive labour market policy, in six East Asian societies: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. We find that all cases except Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced at least one radical shift in their welfare models over the past three decades (1990–2016). East Asian governments have increasingly combined quantitative expansion or retrenchment of 'productive' and 'protective' policy structures but have done so in unique ways. South Korea has followed the most 'balanced' approach to welfare development and stands out as the best candidate for further type-specific expansions moving forward.

QCA based methods have grown in popularity in recent years. Standing between quantitative and qualitative research, in principle they help balance the breadth of analysis provided by quantitative data with the depth of case study knowledge provided by qualitative analysis. The challenge of mixing depth and breadth has always been a particularly acute one for policy based research. Proponents of QCA techniques suggest they are better placed to handle the diversity of policy provision found in different spatial entities than standard linear quantitative methods, while also able to allow for hypothesis testing based upon a fine grained analysis that is more systematic in approach than the techniques typically employed in standard qualitative analyses. The full potential of these methods for policy analysis has yet to be realised however. Partly this is because knowledge of these methods remains at the margins of the policy analysis community, particularly amongst practitioners undertaking applied policy analyses such as policy evaluations. In the introduction to this volume we first outline some of the key principles of QCA research before moving on to identify some of its key advantages. We round off by highlighting key themes explored by the papers included within the volume.

AbstractLeague tables ranking performance outcomes within or between countries have become commonplace in most policy sectors in recent decades and there are numerous examples to be found in practice. UNICEF's 2007 Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries offered a comprehensive and widely cited comparative analysis of children's well being in 21 of the richest countries of the world. Utilising an additive index the authors distilled a large amount of quantitative data relating to children's well being and were able to provide the most comprehensive snapshot of outcomes to date. Whilst an advantage of the method — and certainly a key factor in generating media coverage — was the way it allowed for a ranking of nations, recent debates in the comparative policy analysis literature have pointed to the advantages of methods that aim to classify nations into qualitatively distinct types rather than ranking them in league tables. These debates have particular force when multiple components of analysis are conceptually distinct or cases have widely varying contexts. Fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) has become an increasingly popular alternative approach to the additive index, precisely because it addresses these concerns. In this paper we explore the potential for using FSITA for the comparative analysis of children's well-being. Drawing on the same data and conceptual foundations as the 2007 UNICEF study we explore the potential advantages of utilising a diversity oriented method such as FSITA as tool for policy evaluation that eschews ranking in favour of classifying.

AbstractSeveral theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around 'productive welfare'. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kühner 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the welfare states of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) have a distinct bias towards the 'productive' rather than 'protective' dimensions of welfare. In this article, we build on our earlier work, utilizing fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) to explore the balance between 'productive' and 'protective' dimensions of welfare state activity. Here we extend our analysis beyond the OECD, incorporating a range of nations on the 'fringe' of the OECD from Latin America, East Asia and the non‐OECD parts of Europe. In so doing, we contest simple notions of welfare regimes aligning with regional blocks. Primarily, however, we highlight the advantages of the 'diversity‐orientated' approach to data analysis that fuzzy set methods facilitate in comparison with standard quantitative techniques. In particular, we utilize FSITA to avoid data availability and reliability issues that have plagued quantitatively informed classifications of global welfare regimes. Not least, we argue FSITA allows for the contextualization of cases in a way that is sealed to quantitatively driven, comparative research. Thus, we argue FSITA has an important role to play in attempts to extend the inclusiveness of the 'welfare modelling business' in a manner that reflects diverse and highly significant cases beyond the Western lens that dominates the literature.

The question of how best to account for the multidimensional character of welfare states has become an integral part of discussions on the so-called dependent variable problem within comparative welfare state research. In this paper, we discuss challenges from an attempt to capture productive and protective welfare state dimensions by means of several methodological techniques, namely Z-score standardisation, cluster analysis, factor analysis and fuzzy-set ideal type analysis. While we illustrate that a decision to use any one of these techniques has a substantial bearing on the produced findings, we specifically argue that fuzzy-set ideal type analysis offers considerable advantages over more traditional, statistically rooted approaches. This is particularly true if the observed dimensions are conceptually distinct and 'antithetical'.