INTEGRATION AND ISOMORPHISM AMONG WELFARE STATES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION*

The contemporary institutionalization of an international, regional polity and market in the European Union raises key questions about the role of regional integration in the convergence of European welfare states. To date, sociological work has emphasized processes of industrialization and globalization as the social changes that may drive increasing similarity among welfare states. Building on neoinstitutionalist world polity theory and the Europeanization literature from political science, this paper develops the argument that regional integration drives welfare-state isomorphism by generating, diffusing, and enforcing the adoption of policy scripts concerning “appropriate ” welfare policy. The hypothesis that deepening regional integration drives growing welfare-state isomorphism is tested with time-series data on variation in welfare spending and novel measures of regional integration, for 14 European Union countries, over the 1960-1998 period. Results from cointegrating time-series (OLS) and autocorrelation-corrected (OLS with Newey-West standard errors) regression models support the hypothesis: regional integration is associated with a reduction in variation among the welfare states of the European Union. This suggests that in theorizing contemporary changes in the welfare state, sociologists should attend to the institutionalization of regional political economy. Welfare states can be conceptualized as embedded in regional, as well as global, systems and institutions.