Book Review: The Territorial Politics of Welfare
| DOI | 10.1177/138826270600800107 |
| Author | Herbert Obinger |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
the structures for welfare provision in plural and decentralised states. Likewise, they
claim that local innovation not only spreads new policies at the meso level (‘horizontal
diffusion’), but may produce ‘spillovers’ too, with bottom-up effects on policy
innovation at the federal-central level (‘pacemaker effect’). This book can be read with
profit not only by students of federalism and the welfare state, but by anyone
interested in the wider themes of both the territorial dimension of power and the
social development of our advanced democracies.
Luis Moreno
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Madrid)
Nicola McEwen and Luis Moreno (eds.), The Territorial Politics of Welfare, London
and New York, Routledge (ECPR Studies in European Political Science), 2005, xxv
+ 252 pp., ISBN 041-534-8595
Starting from the general statement that the relationship between the welfare state and
territoriality is under-theorised and under-examined, the editors of this book invited
fourteen international scholars to investigate the linkages between welfare state and
territorial politics from a comparative perspective. The volume that resulted from this
international collaboration is very intriguing and a good complement to a recent
volume edited by Stephan Leibfried, Francis Castles and myself on the relationship
between federalism and the welfare state (reviewed above). Whereas our book focused
on six OECD countries with a long federalist tradition, this book examines the
relationship between social policy and territorial politics primarily in countries where
decentralisation/federalisation is of a more recent vintage. Given the increasing
number of unravelling nation states and the process of European integration over the
last two decades, the nexus between territorial politics and the welfare state is an
important and even explosive topic that has hitherto been under-researched, at least in
comparative perspective.
The book begins with a theoretical chapter written by the editors which provides
an excellent overview of the multi-dimensional and reciprocal relationship between
territorial politics and the welfare state. They address three broad themes: (i) the
relationship between welfare state consolidation and nation-building; (ii) the imp act
of welfare devolution and welfare state retrenchment on inter-regional solidarity and
national unity; and (iii) welfare-state building in the European multi-level system and
the corresponding repercussions on territorial politics. The seven country reports
examine empirically at least one of the first two aforementioned topics. The case
studies cover Italy, the UK, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany and Canada, while the
contribution by Kaisa La
¨hteenma
¨ki-Smith offers a cross-national comparison of
recent developments in the central-local relationship in Nordic welfare states. All the
Book Reviews
3º proef
European Journal of Social Security, Volume 8 (2006), No. 1 115
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