ORIGINAL ARTICLE Thirty years of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism: A review of reviews Martin Powell 1 | Erdem Yörük 2,3 | Ali Bargu 3 1 Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK 2 Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey 3 Department of Social Policy, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Correspondence Martin Powell, Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2RT, UK. Email: m.powell@bham.ac.uk Abstract In the 30 or so years since the publication of Gosta Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism a number of rival welfare state typologies have emerged. This article has two broad aims. First, we review the reviews of welfare state typologies, pointing to issues of often unclear case selection and a wide range of concepts, variables, and methods, resulting in a variety of worlds of welfare and their constituent nations. We show that there is a great variety in the welfare modelling business at two different levels. Reviews vary significantly in terms of the number and composition of included studies, which has made it difficult to sum up the “state of the art.” Individual studies included in the reviews also vary significantly in terms of issues such as aims, concepts, variables, and methods. Second, we produce a new review, which adds value as it is based on a clearer search strategy, and includes more recent material that was not available in earlier reviews. This finds that there is a great variety in terms of process (concepts, variables, methods, and number of countries) and findings (the number and com- position of “worlds”). We argue that the country classifica- tion seems to show less consensus that previous reviews, with fewer “pure” nations (i.e., agreement between studies). We suggest that in order to provide a clear point of engagement, future reviews need to pay more attention to a clear and explicit search strategy, including issues such as inclusion criteria. Received: 20 December 2018 Revised: 3 April 2019 Accepted: 9 April 2019 DOI: 10.1111/spol.12510 Soc Policy Admin. 2019;1–28. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spol 1