More of the Same? Institutional Stability and Change in Contemporary Welfare States

ABSTRACT While there has been a longstanding debate on welfare state retrenchment and convergence, welfare states have mostly been perceived to continuously diverge along previously established lines. This stability is commonly ascribed to institutional legacies and policy feedback. Yet few studies have explored how established social policy models have evolved over time, and thus how path dependency has shaped such developments. Against this backdrop, this article empirically explores the evolution of social insurance institutions between 1980 and 2020. Using data from the Social Policy Indicator database (SPIN) in combination with secondary literature, we assess the stability of social insurance models and explore to what extent historical legacies matter for the observed patterns of change and stability. Our findings show that while there is substantial heterogeneity between welfare states in terms of levels of social rights and directions of change, boundaries between institutional models have become less distinct over time. We discuss the implications of these findings for common assumptions about path dependence across different institutional models and point towards important avenues for future research.