Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print.
Most quantitative, comparative welfare state research assumes that subnational welfare regimes are irrelevant or identical to their national counterparts. Many qualitative case studies, on the other hand, have underlined the differences between subnational and national regimes. In this article, we attempt to build bridges between these two strands of literature by examining the case for a Quebec model, that is, a subnational welfare state regime that is distinct from its Canadian counterpart(s). We reviewed seven publications from which we extracted 188 quantitative results relevant to the distinct subnational regime hypothesis. Although not all these results are independent nor based on conclusive evidence, they generally agree that a distinct welfare regime exists in Quebec. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of the Quebec case for the study of welfare regimes at the subnational and regional levels.