Disability care services between welfare regime pre-conditioning and emancipatory change to independent living: a comparison of 10 European cases with fuzzy set ideal-type analysis

According to Nancy Fraser’s concept of the triple movement of social protection, emancipation, and marketisation, the forces of emancipation can form an alliance with social protection or marketisation. A genuine example of emancipation is the transformation of residential disability care services to personal assistance. However, what remains unclear is why some reforms overlap more with marketisation and others overlap more with social protection, whereas other countries did not undertake any pervasive reforms in their disability care services. This paper attempts to illuminate this issue by examining the morphogenetic approach to explain developments within disability care services in 10 European countries. A fuzzy set ideal type analysis was used to delineate four types of disability care services. The analysis assigned Greece, Slovenia, and Spain to the domestic-traditional type; Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland to the benevolent–paternalist type; Sweden to the encompassing-progressive type; and Latvia, the Slovak Republic, and the United Kingdom to the precarious-progressive type.