Essay Question 5000 words count
Undertake a comparative analysis of at least three welfare states focusing on three or more policy areas (e.g. social security, housing, health, education, labor market policy, ECEC, and family policy).
The outline below gives an understanding of the essay question, checks the essay structure, and answers the essay question properly.
Comparative Social Policy/Social Welfare Analysis
What is social policy?
- Multi-disciplinary (e.g. sociology, history, economics, and political science) field of study, shares certain interests and core concepts with these and other established disciplines
- Analysis of social policy, including core social policy programmes and areas such as social security, housing, health, education, labour market policy, family policy, or cover the welfare state as a whole
What is Comparative Analysis
- CSP analysis might consider, for example, what and how policies are delivered in different countries, why policies have developed similarly or seem to diverge, or what outcomes they produce
- Important here are the units of analysis, or cases, often countries, ‘large-N’ (quantitative) or ‘small-N’ (qualitative)
- Researchers interested in the causes for policy emergence and variation in policy development draw on macro-sociology, political economy, and history frameworks
- Researchers interested in assessing the effects of social policies across countries might turn to evaluation and study policy implementation
why compare?
- Issues, concepts, functional equivalence, abstractions
- Causation, ideals, classification
- Research designs – experimental and non-experimental
- Methods, how to compare? – Large N (quantitative Studies) – Small N (qualitative Studies)
What to Compare?
– Macro (welfare states, welfare regime)
– Micro (poverty rates, unemployment rates, and welfare restructuring across nations)
Essay structure (5000 WORD COUNT)
- Essay question (always answer the question)
- Introduction
– Introduce the topic, theories, concepts
– Demonstrate your understanding of the question
– Explain how you propose to tackle it (i.e. outline the structure of the essay)
- Body
– Follow the outline provided in the introduction
– Demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the subject matter
– Define/explain theories, key concepts + references
– Develop your argument in a clear and analytical way
– Present the evidence on which your conclusions will be based
- Conclusion
– Summarize the main arguments of the essay
– Provide your answer to the original question
- References
– List the sources which you have cited in the essay, using an appropriate format
– the Harvard style of referencing should be used for this course
NOTE
Your reference should be between 20-25 books. Let all the books you use be related to what you discuss in the essay.
These books will be useful and get more for the work
Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) Three Worlds study of welfare systems in 18 countries
Blum, S., Kuhlmann, J. and Schubert, K. eds., 2019. Routledge Handbook of European Welfare Systems. Routledge.
The real worlds of welfare capitalism by Robert E. Goodin · Ruud Muffels · Bruce Headey
