A Comparative Analysis of Current Developments in Social Security Studies

Abstract

Though a country’s social security system is closely related to its economy and society, it is directly designed and operated by its politics (Hicks 1999; Stephens et al. 1999). Unlike social security studies from other academic perspectives, political science always tries to identify the essential political mechanism creating a country’s social security system. By focusing on political factors’ impact on social security development, the structure and the qualitative development of a social security system, in addition to the political results of the running of social security system, existing studies usually start from a macro and supply perspective, preferring to use official statistical data on macro supply to support their arguments. Compared with political science studies, economic studies on social security usually identify the correlation between the economy and social security by testing their mutual effects and paying attention to the economic efficiency of the running of social security system, preferring quantitative methods and statistical data to evaluate national social security development and test the hypothesis on the correlation. Sociologists focus on ‘how a society modifies its social security, and what social security does to the society’. They also test mutual interactions between their independent and dependent variables, as do scholars from the other two schools, but prefer using data obtained through surveys and usually start from a micro and demand perspective. This review will examine the general nature and value of the development of existing studies from a political perspective. The fact that studies with the same arguments may adopt different methods, or studies may use similar methods to support very different arguments, seriously undermines the reliability of arguments put forward by existing reviews, especially in the case of individual countries. To eliminate that problem, a proper review, comparison and evaluation of the major aspects of existing studies is necessary to identify the main arguments of previous studies on social security system, as well as their limitations, from a political science perspective.