In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders made no secret of his admiration for the Nordic countries. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, eventually reached a breaking point with the Nordiphilia and interjected, “I love Denmark, but we are not Denmark! We are the United States of America.”

It is tempting to read Clinton’s remark as a simple failure of political imagination. After all, as Sanders rightly asked, why can’t Americans also have universal health care? Or a more comprehensive welfare state? But in a way, Clinton wasn’t wrong. Whatever similarities the United States and the Nordic countries share as postindustrial, capitalist economies, they do represent fundamentally different ways of mixing capitalism and welfare provision. And that matters.

For that insight, we must credit Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen. Though Esping-Andersen was not the first to point out that the institutional architectures of welfare systems diverge in important ways, he bundled this argument with some creative theorizing (drawing on the likes of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and T.H. Marshall) and a memorable tripartite typology: his oft-cited liberal, conservative, and social democratic “welfare regimes.”