Abstract

The year of writing this article marks the 25th anniversary of Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s 1990 book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. More and more models of welfare, welfare regimes or welfare capitalism are being debated throughout ever more regions in the world. Hence, there is mounting need for extending the reach of the original work and theory of Esping-Andersen, in the only true original meaning of it, by looking at its very core, the ideal-typical perspective of welfare regime theory in the Weberian sense, as mentioned by Esping-Andersen in his 1987 article (see also Ebbinghaus, 2012; Arts and Gelissen, 2002, 2010; Aspalter, 2005a, 2006, 2011; Jaeger, 2006; Aspalter, Kim and Park, 2009).