How the Countries Compare

Abstract

This chapter introduces the four countries under consideration, and provides important background information for readers when later examining these same states’ social policy reactions during times of crisis. The focus is on small, open economies of roughly similar size in terms of population and GDP — namely Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden.¹ We employ a ‘diverse cases’ research design (Seawright and Gerring, 2008) that aims at a high degree of representativeness of the cases while, at the same time, using the variation on several theoretically relevant variables for multiple comparisons between cases. The countries chosen vary regarding the institutional characteristics of their political systems, their systems of interest intermediation, and their welfare state regimes. In this chapter, some central quantitative indicators are used to embed the cases within the larger group of OECD countries.