Origins
The three worlds of welfare capitalism compared cash benefits such as pensions and unemployment insurance. Feminist scholars such as Lewis (1992) said care was missing. Anttonen and Sipilä (1996) compared European social services, contrasting Nordic public service models with Southern family care, and Daly and Lewis (2000) proposed 'social care' as a concept tracing how labour, responsibility and cost are shared among state, market and family.
Types of care regime
Esping-Andersen (1999) added familialism and defamilialisation to regime comparison. Bettio and Plantenga (2004) used leave, childcare and elder-care data to classify European countries into family-reliant (Southern), publicly serviced (Nordic) and leave-centred types. Saraceno and Keck (2010) distinguished supported familialism, familialism by default and defamilialisation.
Markets, migration and debates
Simonazzi (2009) linked care regimes to employment models, showing how cash-for-care countries in Southern Europe developed a 'migrant-in-the-family' model. Care regimes help explain new social risks from ageing and dual earning, but critics note large within-country variation in quality and workers' conditions, and that child and elder care follow different logics.
FAQ
- What are care regimes in simple terms?
- A way of comparing countries by whether families, public services or markets mainly care for children and older people.
- What is the difference between familialism and defamilialisation?
- Familialism leaves care mainly to families; defamilialisation shifts part of it to the state or market.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26
References
- Anttonen, A., & Sipilä, J. (1996). European social care services: Is it possible to identify models? Journal of European Social Policy, 6(2), 87–100. An early typology of European social care services.
- Daly, M., & Lewis, J. (2000). The concept of social care and the analysis of contemporary welfare states. The British Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 281–298. Makes social care a key concept for welfare-state analysis.
- Esping-Andersen, G. (1999). Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford University Press. Brings familialism and defamilialisation into regime analysis.
- Bettio, F., & Plantenga, J. (2004). Comparing care regimes in Europe. Feminist Economics, 10(1), 85–113. A quantitative classification of European care regimes.
- Simonazzi, A. (2009). Care regimes and national employment models. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33(2), 211–232. Links care regimes, employment models and migrant care work.
- Saraceno, C., & Keck, W. (2010). Can we identify intergenerational policy regimes in Europe? European Societies, 12(5), 675–696. Identifies intergenerational policy regimes by familialism type.
- Lewis, J. (1992). Gender and the development of welfare regimes. Journal of European Social Policy, 2(3), 159–173. Brought gender and care into regime comparison.