Regional Welfare Systems in Italy: a Cluster Analysis

Abstract

The reforms of welfare systems, which happened in different countries, have generated more differences at the local authority, thus the improvement of welfare organization has followed specific development methods providing different services for the citizenship living in the same country. The welfare classification research at cross-national level have not considered the heterogeneity of national welfare system, as underlined by Bertin’s (2012b) research, based on an Italian case study, which identified that the Italian welfare system could be classify in seven different welfare regimes. Thus, this analysis, using the same data of Bertin’s (2012b) analysis and applying a different cluster analysis method (K-mean), attempts to confirm the Bertin’s (2012b) classification. The results corroborate some models of welfare systems identified by previous research but other cluster groups suggest that it is useful to conduct deep analysis in order to distinguish some more welfare system features.