The European Welfare Regimes: Political Orientations Versus Poverty

The paper analyzes how the political context shapes the social spending, as main mechanism of welfare state, on the one hand, and poverty reduction, as the main welfare state aim, on the other hand. In order to identify this impact, we conduct a panel regression analysis of social spending efficiency in reducing poverty in the European welfare regimes. The analysis covers 14 EU countries that are grouped according to welfare state regimes: Social democratic, Corporatist, Mediterranean and Liberal welfare state regime. The panel regression results indicate that the political orientation had no statistically significant impact on the movement of poverty rate in the EU-14. In the period from 1995 to 2006, the increasing of the value index of political concentration was not accompanied by significant decline in the poverty rate. Practically, it means that the results in reducing poverty didn’t differ substantially among countries where the government was established by left or by right political parties. There are two possible explanations for such findings. First, a longer period of time is necessary in order to observe the actual effect of political orientation on social welfare. Second, the political parties and their programs are not influential, strong enough to solve social problems by themselves. Their influence is indirect and expressed through changes in the social spending.