Accounting for the long-term stability of the welfare-state regimes in a model with distributive preferences and social norms

After the Esping-Andersen' (1990) seminal study, welfare states are standardingly clustered in three identifiable regimes, liberal for Anglo-Saxon countries, corporatist for Continental Europe and social-democratic for Nordic countries, into which the levels of income redistribution can be ranked, from the lowest for the first to the highest for the last. By finding that most European continental countries are now clustered in the high-taxation group along with Nordic countries, a recent study by Péligry and Ragot (2022) has suggested that the welfare states can evolve and change over time, casting doubt on the long-term stability of the canonical clustering.