Abstract
This chapter provides a discussion of the debates and challenges involved with measuring the welfare state as well as a brief foray into multilevel modeling techniques. These essential research design aspects lay the groundwork for the quantitative empirical analyses to follow and guide the reader through issues and topics related to concept-measurement consistency and data and measurement of welfare states. In a second step, the substantive and logical reasoning behind multilevel or hierarchical regression models is discussed with regard to the cross-national study of political attitudes and behaviors.
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Notes
- 1.
These population data are also available from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The weight perhaps underestimates the actual daycare need for families, as in most countries, children have not entered into all-day school by the age of five. While this is certainly a weakness of the data, it can, however, be considered as a rather minor limitation. The adjustment for cash benefits (age 15) is also an approximation, as the age limits for child allowances also vary widely across countries. That being said, although these weights are approximations, failing to include any sort of adjustment of population and structural needs would lead to artificially high spending levels for many countries.
- 2.
I return to the matter of causes and effects in the discussion of the results of the quantitative analyses.
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Shore, J. (2019). Empirical Approaches to the Study of Democratic Citizens and Welfare States. In: The Welfare State and the Democratic Citizen. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93961-2_4
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