A care regime typology of elder, long-term care institutions

This study generates a classification of 26 European OECD countries with respect to care regimes. Care regimes are ‘social joins’ on the nexus between the state and the family, grouping countries into ‘types’ that have similar characteristics with respect to state care institutions. The latter are formal arrangements by the state that may alleviate citizens’ care burdens either financially, in kind, or both. We build upon the literature on the dimensions of defamilialisation and familialism and empirically test how these two dimensions indicate different types of care regimes. We expect to find at least three different regime types that combine either high reliance on defamilialisation or on supported familialism, or the lack of both. We collected macro-data of 26 countries on five indicators of elder care institutions from various sources and subsequently performed latent profile analysis to group these countries into classes of similar state care arrangements. The results reveal three care regime types: ‘strong Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’; ‘moderate Defamilialisation/Supported Familialism’; and ‘Familialism-by-Default’. This classification contributes to developing a theoretical framework of care institutions and can guide other scholars in understanding contextual differences in socio-economic causes and consequences of elder care in Europe.