• DOI:10.1177/0020715212469512
• Corpus ID: 154903810

Regimes and cultures of social security: Comparing institutional models through nonlinear PCA

@article{Vrooman2012RegimesAC,
  title={Regimes and cultures of social security: Comparing institutional models through nonlinear PCA},
  author={J. Cok Vrooman},
  journal={International Journal of Comparative Sociology},
  year={2012},
  volume={53},
  pages={444 - 477}
}

• J. Vrooman
• Published 1 October 2012
• Economics
• International Journal of Comparative Sociology

This article reassesses the link between the structural and cultural aspects of social security. Do Esping-Andersen’s ‘Three Worlds’ exist empirically if one considers a comprehensive set of formal institutions simultaneously? And if so, do such regimes coincide with coherent differences in people’s value orientations in this field, or informal cultures? In order to answer these questions, nonlinear principal components analysis was applied to a group of countries at the core of the original Esping-Andersen typology. Nonlinear PCA seems to be a promising tool for comparative research because the technique is able to handle discrete data and nonlinear relationships, and the number of variables can exceed the number of countries. The outcomes of the analyses suggest that the ‘Three Worlds’ of formal social security had a firm empirical basis in the 1990s, and that the typology remains largely valid today, albeit with some qualifications. Furthermore, three different informal ‘cultures of social security’ emerged, with country clusters quite similar to those of the structural regime typology.