Comparative Welfare States Data Set

Assembled by Evelyne Huber, Charles Ragin, and John D. Stephens
December 1997

Updated by David Brady, Jason Beckfield, and John Stephens
April 2004

This update includes the original Comparative Welfare States Data Set, and updates and additions by Stephens, Brady, and Beckfield.  Several new variables were added and most variables were updated to 2000..  Variables in the original data set were updated using more recent versions of the original sources, and also with some new sources.  Some of the original sources are unavailable in recent years and no alternative source could be identified, so those variables were not always updated.  In particular, the ILO social spending data which were the basis for many analyses beginning in the mid-1970s has not been updated.  Note that some updates of those data are available to the interested scholar at the ILO website.  The sources used are listed in chronological order, with the most recent source last.  Dennis Quinn, Lane Kenworthy, David Neumark, Duane Swank, and William Wascher generously provided several new variables.  New variables are listed with an asterisk (*) after the variable description and source.  With the adoption of the Euro in several EU countries, users should be careful in constructing ratios and percentages.  One should be certain that both the numerator and denominator are in the same currency in every year.  The data sources have been inconsistent in retroactively converting entire or partial time series to the Euro currency.  The Gerhard E. Lenski Chair held by John D. Stephens provided financial support for the work at the University of North Carolina.

Preface to the 1997 data set.

The data contained in this data set were collected by a project entitled "The Welfare State in Comparative Perspective: Determinants, Program Characteristics, and Outcomes" directed by Evelyne Huber, Charles Ragin, and John Stephens. This project received seed money from the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research (now Institute for Policy Research) at Northwestern University in 1989-90 and was supported in 1990-92 by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Grant # SES 9108716). The LIS project also aided in the early stages of data collection. Continued support in 1992-97 was provided by the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, the Department of Political Science, and the Morehead Alumni Chair held by Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina, and by the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

 In the initial stage of data collection in 1989-92, it was the intention of the project directors to collect a wide range of indicators of welfare state development, its causes, and its outcomes on an annual basis for the period 1945-89. The data for the period before 1960 proved to be far too spotty for inclusion in pooled time series analysis. For this reason, this data set begins with data for 1960. Because the project leaders were faced with limited resources in the process of updating the data to 1994, the data series for a number of variables for which data are available for the period 1990-94 were not updated. Generally, it can be said that OECD data are available for this period. However, data from the ILO's Cost of Social Security, the single most important source for data on social expenditure, were not available beyond 1989 as of December 1997.

 Citation: In any work using data from this data set, please cite both the data set and, where appropriate, the original source. In most cases, the original source can simply be cited as OECD or ILO. In others, for example the capital controls data provided by Dennis Quinn, a full citation should be included. Please cite this data set as Evelyne Huber, Charles Ragin, John D. Stephens, David Brady, and Jason Beckfield, Comparative Welfare States Data Set, Northwestern University, University of North Carolina, Duke University and Indiana University, 2004.

The project directors ask scholars using this data set in conference papers and publications to send a copy of the papers or publications to send the papers and publications to Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265.Please direct any questions about this data set to John D. Stephens at the address above or at the e-mail addresses mention on this page. We intend to update this data set every three or four years and demonstrating that it is widely used will help us to secure funding to carry out the work.

Download the CWS Database Codebook (PDF)

Dowload Dataset (Excel file)