What is it about?
There are two leading state-of-the-art tools of measurings welfare states, Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlement Dataset (CWED). Welfare state specialists assume that they largely measure the same thing. We compare their data points and find striking discrepancies across these datasets.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
In comparative welfare state research, we generally assume that CWED and SCIP measure welfare stateness (social rights) in very similar (if not identical) ways. Our findings show that there are significant discrepancies. These discrepancies are all the more important when we focus on the 'retrenchment' debate -- we have come across instances where one dataset points to retrenchment for a country in a given period, the other reports expansion for the same country for the same period. We thus reveal a new layer of problems to the debate on 'the dependent variable problem' in comparative welfare state research.
Perspectives
We have always been impressed by these two very powerful tools. That is why we started generated data for Turkey (a case which had never been covered in either of the datasets) for these two datasets and found out that there exist striking disparities between the data points they code for the same country/year. We were intrigued by these disparities and explored potential reasons why they existed. With this piece of research, we hope to contribute to the debate on the 'dependent variable problem' notorious in comparative welfare state research.
H. Tolga Bolukbasi
Bilkent Universitesi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Conceptualizing and operationalizing social rights: Towards higher convergent validity in SCIP and CWED, Journal of European Social Policy, June 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0958928717700565.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
