Towards a Welfare Research Framework in the Countries of Eastern Partnership Initiative

The Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative is a EU project aiming to advance socioeconomic development in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. To date, virtually no research has been done on comparative welfare systems in these countries. This paper aims to narrow this gap. It is argued here that the comparative welfare state approach for the Central and Eastern European Post-Communist countries is not appropriate for the selected region, since weak democratic institutions and economic underperformance contradict the foundations of the welfare state. The paper instead considers a welfare regime paradigm developed for less advanced nations. The empirical part is based on the clustering method to analyse different welfare indicators and on binomial logistic regressions to scrutinise public attitudes towards welfare. The results indicate that the welfare outcomes in EaP countries can be clustered into three distinct groups, but that using conventional welfare state variables cannot explain the systematic determinants of varying welfare performance among the countries. It appears that employing the welfare regime framework, which more vividly takes into account the domestic and international activities of state, market and household, can increase the robustness of research of the strategies employed by EaP countries to address their social risks