Protective, active and legislative disability policy in 10 OECD countries through the lends of fuzzy ideal type analysis (FSITA)

There is growing interest in the increasing numbers of disabled people, expanding public expenditure on that group, and proliferating initiatives for return-to-work of people with disabilities. Individual countries are implementing various institutional sets of disability policy including return-to-work programmes and benefit provisions. This thesis aims to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of disability policy and its change over time. In particular, it attempts to answer two questions: whether there are different disability policy models; and how disability policy has changed over time. The first question involves the construction of disability policy models and their relationship with welfare state regimes. Based on the typologising approach, it is expected to identify different disability policy ideal types. The second question involves the discussion on convergence. Similar to the welfare state discussion, the question of convergence in disability policy is a salient issue. Based on the findings of previous studies, this thesis explored four attributes of disability policy: protective benefit scheme, protective employment programme, activation approach and legislative regulation. Taking advantage of an emerging comparative methodology, fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA), the thesis constructed ideal types of disability policy and applied these to the empirical analysis of ten developed countries from 1990 or earliest available time to 2010 or last available time. The findings were that the disability policy models are different to the welfare state regimes and that the over time change of disability policy shows some movement away from convergence. Some countries enhanced both their protective functioning and activation approaches, whereas other concentrated solely on activation. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to the construction of disability policy models in a conceptual way and shows differences between the models and the welfare state regimes put forward by leading researchers in the field. These differences confirm the necessity for individual policy analysis. Furthermore, the thesis identifies contingent convergence in disability policy by showing different policy priorities across countries. Practically speaking, policy makers could use the findings for precise decision making, based on the mapping of the features and outcomes of disability policy in neighbouring countries on the property space.