Three worlds of welfare state research

This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there are increasing opportunities for intellectual exchange across these clusters. Research in this important empirical subfield of comparative politics has been pluralistic and eclectic, both methodologically and theoretically. Overall, this stance has yielded substantial benefits.