Book review: Post-Communist Welfare States in European Context. Patterns of Welfare Policies in Central and Eastern Europe

Date01 December 2018
DOI10.1177/1388262718819557
Published date01 December 2018
Subject MatterBook reviews
Book reviews
Kati Kuitto, Post-Communist Welfare States in European Context. Patterns of Welfare Policies in Central
and Eastern Europe, Cheltenham (UK) / Northampton (MA): Edward Elgar, 2016, 224 pages, ISBN
978-1-78471-197-9 (Hardcover).
Reviewed by: Dorottya Szikra, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
DOI: 10.1177/1388262718819557
This book is based on the exploration of the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset’s second
round (CWED2) that included Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The author’s and
her colleagues’ effort to integrate CEE countries into the ‘large-n’ European comparative works on
welfare state development cannot be overstated. Although these countries (Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) joined
the European Union a decade ago (in 2004 and in 2007), they are still often left out of European
comparative studies or are analysed as a separate set of cases. Against this background, Kuitto’s
aim is to investigate whether CEE welfare states do actually form a distinct welfare state regime
type or whether they fit other, well-established, Western welfare state models. In this way, she not
only contributes to our better understanding of welfare state development in Eastern Europe but
also helps to smooth the East-West divide that still seems to be difficult to overcome today, some
thirty years after the breakdown of state socialist rule.
Kuitto builds her macro-level comparative analysis of CEE welfare states on solid theoretical
and methodological foundations. She starts from a distant perspective questioning whether the
ideal-typical welfare regimes, as formulated by Esping-Andersen (1990) in his seminal work, still
exist in the reality of today. She divides her research up into various phases. In the first stage, she
contrasts the ideal types (created on the basis of data from the 1980s) with the real-world of
Western European welfare states. In the second stage, she compares CEE welfare states during
the period of 2005 and 2007 with the ‘real’ welfare states in Western Europe in the same period. In
her words, ‘first and foremost the actual contemporary Western European welfare models serve as
the frame of reference for the empirical assessment’ (71).
Kati Kuitto has a much more ambitious aim than ‘just’ formulating a typology of CEE welfare
states. Her book has a great deal to say not only about the place of CEE welfare regimes in Europe
(which in itself is a considerable achievement) but also about the relevance of Esping-Andersen’s
typology at the beginning of the 21st century. Overall, her intention is to ‘assess the welfare policy
arrangements in CEE countries in the light of welfare regime theory’ (70).
Kuitto disaggregates her research question into five carefully formulated hypotheses (76-77).
The first two relate to the established Western welfare states and ask whether these countries still
European Journal of Social Security
2018, Vol. 20(4) 374–392
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejs
EJSS
EJSS

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT