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Book Review: Federalism and the Welfare State. New World and European Experiences

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorLuis Moreno
DOI10.1177/138826270600800106
Published date01 March 2006
Date01 March 2006
Subject MatterBook Review
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BOOK REVIEWS
Herbert Obinger, Stephan Leibfried and Francis G. Castles (eds.), Federalism and
the Welfare State. New World and European Experiences, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2005, xvi + 363 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-521-61184-8 (paperback)
Federalism and the welfare state have too often lived separate lives. Broadly speaking,
the territorial politics literature has tended to neglect the social dimension, while
research on welfare has taken the centralised nation-state for granted. This book
addresses this thematic dichotomy by studying six long-standing democratic
federations within the welfare capitalism of the so-called ‘New World’ (Australia,
Canada, and the United States of America) and the ‘Old Continent’ (Austria, Germany,
Switzerland). In the chapters dealing with the case studies, the various contributors
carry out in-depth examinations which provide the reader not only with rigorous
analytical information but with sound interpretations. Numerous issues are raised in
this book, which pioneers the study of federal institutional arrangements and social
policy making within the broader field of study concerning territoriality and welfare.
Despite commonalities, such as having written constitutions or constitutional
courts acting as institutional arbitrators, the six federations show notable differences
and peculiarities when it comes to the specific arrangements of their welfare states.
They are grouped by the editors into two main clusters: the Germanic and the Anglo-
Saxon. These ‘families of nations’ almost correspond to the Corporatist and Liberal
welfare regimes, although in-group variations are by no means small. An overriding
search for academic parsimony impels the editors to propose a simple binary
distinction between ‘inter-state’ and ‘intra-state’ forms of federalism, which
corresponds to the already well-researched and well-established terminology concern-
ing the ‘dual’ and ‘co-operative’ federal variants. Confusion between ‘inter’ and
...

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