Alexandra Kaasch and Cansu Erdogan, University of Bielefeld

This session addresses the questions of whether and how different welfare regimes and degrees of familialism affect COVID-19 measures related to long-term care policies. We aim to bring together scholars from comparative welfare state and long-term care research to understand and discuss transformations in care policies in different countries in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. While the global COVID-19 pandemic currently has a serious effect on anybody’s life, it has been particularly hard on vulnerable people under long-term care in care homes. In addition to already existing deep-rooted problems in long-term care, this new infectious disease has already caused many elderly people losing their lives in care homes – partly caused by staff shortages, inadequate safety measures and infection prevention.

Countries responded with different sorts of measures to this ever-growing problem. In this session, we ask whether these policy responses are path-dependent and how related measures can be understood with reference to welfare state regime types. We also would like to go beyond the three worlds of welfare capitalism and discuss papers from different parts of the world. In this way, we aim to have a broader understanding of the patterns of transforming care policies in times of COVID-19 pandemic from a comparative perspective.