Social welfare across the Middle East and North Africa: A configurational typology

Abstract Comparative welfare-regime typologies were constructed from a set of wealthy democracies in which several conditions held so reliably that they remained unstated: that welfare systems cover the national population, that financing rests on taxation or contributory insurance, that states hold sovereignty and administrative capacity, that stratification follows class or market position, and that provision expands across time. This article presents a configurational analysis of 21 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states through fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The analysis maps how welfare is organised across the region and distinguishes rentier-citizenship, eroded-corporatist, monarchical-patronage, confessional-fragmented, and conflict-disrupted configurations. State capacity and the absence of large-scale conflict emerge as the conditions most strongly associated with a functioning regime, while the remaining conditions shape the configurations that form. The wider argument holds that exclusion mechanisms, namely citizenship, formality, ascriptive identity, sovereignty deprivation, and institutional disruption, rather than decommodification alone, offer a productive organising principle for comparative welfare analysis beyond the OECD. The MENA evidence is treated as indicative of boundary conditions rather than as a decisive test of any single theory, since other world regions would generate additional configurations.