MONGRELS OR THOROUGHBREDS - A CROSS-NATIONAL LOOK AT SOCIAL-SECURITY SYSTEMS

This paper reviews the methodological issues raised by different comme ntators' attempts to categorise countries' social security systems int o 'regime types' or 'models'. It is argued that there are two major pr oblems with these categorisations: (1) the difficulty of finding empir ical counterparts to the theoretical concepts used; (2) the complexity of actual social security systems, arising in particular from the div ersity of benefits within each system. Despite these problems, we argu e that it is possible to maintain a theoretically-informed approach to the comparative analysis of social security, by adopting a more flexi ble methodology. The approach presented in this paper identifies some of the main principles on which social security systems are based, spe cifies their empirical counterparts, and allows each national system t o be analysed in terms of its particular conjunction or combination of principles.