Varieties of Equality in European Welfare States

In today’s European market-based democracies, different Welfare regimes refer to different benchmarks of how human beings ought to live. I contend that such a difference in European political economies derives from the interpretation that each State has regarding the principle of equality and the place the latter has in the hierarchy of values of each society. Using the thought of the major political and economic thinkers on equality as a norm and as a policy, I propose a new sociological paradigm to interpret and classify the welfare states in Europe’s industrialized democracies in contemporary times, putting forward three ideal-types of equality of reference that welfare states refer to in their political economy. I then analyze the ideological and cultural context that diffuses the variety of equality by describing the normative context of social justice under which social choice is operated by resorting to epistemological and communitarian philosophy. I give an account of the phenomenology of the Welfare state and the historical and economic background to the literature review of the models of social policy that conceptualize it and take the best practices in literature to form my model. I successively design an original measure of welfare state performance in redistributing income and wealth both at the general distributional level and at the various segments of the distribution. I conclude by examining how the change in the varieties of equality derives from the axiological preferences that form the hierarchy of values and vice-versa.