Three worlds of world capitalism or more’ briefly explains the debates regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states. Also, this article reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from the debate. In Esping- Andersen’s book, he categorized welfare states into three kinds. It is liberal welfare states, conservative/corporatist welfare states and social-democratic welfare states. He connected his differentiation with variations in the historical development of different Western countries. He claimed that current economic processes, such as those moving toward a postindustrial order, are shaped not by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. In response to the way of Andersen’s description, Gelissen mainly suggests that 3 mistakes exist.

First and foremost, it is about the misspecification of the Mediterranean welfare states as immature continental ones. Critics say that Southern European or Latin Rim countries have their own distinguishing characteristics. Therefore, Anderson’s act of categorizing these countries under conservative continental model while additionally terming “immature” is definitely not true. As Anderson recognized and discovered that these countries have unique characteristics which reflect their culture and society themselves, he should add new categories. In order to classify Mediterranean welfare state, Anderson must make a distinctive model and name it as “Latin Rim” or “Southern countries.”

Second, it is related to the labelling of the Antipodean welfare states as belonging to the ‘liberal’ regime type. In general, liberal welfare states usually have the theme of getting minimum interest to public welfare and finding the need to test social policies. However, Antipodes are not the case at the critic’s point of view. The reason is that Antipodes have showed the world’s most comprehensive systems of means-tested income support benefits. Considering the income maintenance and redistribution in regards of means-tested, Antipodean welfare states should not be included to the liberal one and must be categorized in a segregated category.

Lastly, Gelissen criticizes that Anderson neglected the gender-dimension in social policy. Gelissen argues that Esping-Anderson designed his original three welfare state model without addressing women’s roles in equitable participation as both workers and benefits recipients. Women are often differently stratified by unreal commodification and stratification, yet Esping Anderson assumed equality of citizen rights by gender in his research methods. Inclusion of the state welfare policies of the definitions of women, labor participation, maternity and parental benefits, tax schemes, and child care support needs to be added to assessment research method. It is the intersection of all three sectors of individual, state, and family policy that should determine welfare state typology. Finally, until the value of unpaid caring work done by women is included, welfare state typology will be incomplete.

Gelissen asserts that several typologies of welfare state exist for certain reasons. This includes in order to establish, first, whether real welfare states are quite similar to others or whether they are rather unique specimens, and, second, whether there are three ideal-typical worlds of welfare capitalism or more. People normally conclude that real welfare states are hardly ever pure types and are usually hybrid cases; and that the issue of ideal-typical welfare states cannot be satisfactorily answered given the lack of formal theorizing and the still inconclusive outcomes of comparative research. In spite of this conclusion there is plenty of reason to continue to work on and with the original or modified typologies.

In my opinion, considering the way the book was written, I think Anderson had thought that the Scandinavian ‘social-democratic model’ model was best. Furthermore, I guess that he comes from a communist perspective in terms of a certain dislike of the market and an assertion that having to sell one’s labor to earn a living makes people into ‘commodities.” I do not share his politics completely, but I think his idea that people should not judge the generosity of a welfare state by the amount spent on so-called social protection. Only taking just the total amount spent might be entirely misleading. While reading this article, I thought that Anderson seems to have no interest or concern about whether the state is a good parent. In fact, on the whole, he seems to think it is indeed a good parent and that a child does not really benefit from having a married father and mother. This issue just does not figure with him-at least in what I have read. Also, he believed that the Scandinavian model- because it gave generous benefits to the middle classes, would continue to have the support of the middle classes and that this meant the Scandinavian welfare had better prospects. In addition, he suspected that all the countries of the conservative and social democrat sort are gradually, perhaps inevitably, sliding towards more social assistance. To put it bleakly, the conservative/corporatist and the social-democratic welfare states may gradually slide into being liberal welfare states- probably the most damaging kind. He seems, from what I have read, to miss out much comment on social housing. There is also no mention that I have seen- and perhaps this is because it was written quite a while ago- of the interesting that have developed in Singapore, Switzerland and Chile.

To sum up, I think Gellisen’s idea does have value after all. Although Anderson gives a broad brush introduction to the different origins of a large batch of welfare states, Gellisen points out well what the author misses. I am not denying that Andersen's typology did not help shed significant light on current political debates, and did not provide a more nuanced understanding of the various different ways in which, for example, Obama's politics can be progressive in one sense, yet conservative in another. I just think in some point that Esping-Andersen's analysis rested first on several convergent sets of hard data to distinguish the different types, followed by a more qualitative approach to analyze and describe the differences. By now, the data he used are quite dated, but historically they seem quite sound. The question, however, remains: to what extent have the current states altered from what they were before? This is particularly the case as increasingly the cross-national spread of post-materialist values gives universal prominence to issues of autonomy, self-governance and quality of life, creating a more individualist prism than was commonplace in past generations.