Comparative Social Policy: A Historical Overview of the Field

This article aims to provide a succinct historical overview of comparative social policy. Typified by both challenges and benefits, comparative social policy started to experience a period of growth in the 1960s, a time characterized by the dominance of the socalled Keynesian welfare state. It will be argued that the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990, during a period marked by the omnipotence of the so-called Schumpeterian welfare state, coincides with the beginning of a new era for comparative social policy, one that has resulted in it being recognized as a separate field of study. The article discusses the main characteristics of each evolutionary phase of comparative social policy, as exemplified by the preponderance of descriptive studies and the functionalist family of welfare state explanations in the pre-1990 years and the dominance of the welfare state taxonomies in the post-1990 period. In spite of the challenges that are yet to be overcome, the proliferation of studies in the field transmits positive messages about the future of comparative social policy