Comparative Welfare States

Welfare states are how modern democracies decide who gets protected from market risks—unemployment, illness, old age, poverty—and this course gives you the conceptual toolkit to compare those choices across countries rather than treating any one system as normal. You'll work through the classic typologies (Esping-Andersen's three worlds and the global critiques that followed), trace why welfare states expanded after WWII and why they've been under retrenchment pressure since the 1980s, and end on how different regime types responded to COVID-19. Expect reading-heavy seminars, a research report, and presentations; it pairs naturally with comparative politics and political economy coursework, and matters because almost every policy debate you'll encounter—pensions, healthcare, family policy—is downstream of the frameworks built here.