COMPARATIVE WELFARE STATE POLITICS
| Author | PETER STARKE |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12291 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12291
REVIEW
COMPARATIVE WELFARE STATE POLITICS
Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis
Cambridge University Press, 2013, 260 pp., £50 (hb), ISBN: 978–0521183710
Comparative Welfare State Politics is not one, but two, books combined. The authors, Kees
van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis, state in the preface that their intention was to write a
‘cross between a textbook and a research monograph’ (p. xi). Regarding the rst ambition,
the volume clearly closes a gap. Perhaps together with Chris Pierson’s (2006) Beyond the
Welfare State? this is the only English-language textbook on welfarestates from an explicitly
comparative political science angle. It is strongly theory based and covers the state of the
art in the literature dealing with the historical development and change of welfare states
in rich democracies. It presents the key accounts and summarizes the main debates, from
the classic theoretical schools which explain welfare state development, through welfare
regimes and welfare state challenges to political theories of reform.
Empirically, the authors look at the history from the birth of the modern welfare state
in the late nineteenth century up to the Great Recession in the aftermath of the Financial
Crisis of 2008. Moreover,they describe the welfare state’s impact on poverty and inequality
concisely and nevertheless discuss various indicators in a nuanced way. Instead of being
organized along the lines of, say, theoretical schools, welfare regime types or historical
periods, the ten chapters address a series of ‘big questions’, including ‘Why did we need a
welfare state in the rst place?’, ‘What does the welfare state actually do?’, ‘Why is reform
so difcult and electorally risky but why does it nevertheless happen?’ (p. 4). The different
chapters can therefore easily be read separately, but there are many cross-references that
contribute to the impression of a coherent whole when the book is readfrom cover to cover.
As a research monograph (the second ambition), the book is naturally more selective
and focuses on a number of arguments that are empirically illustrated with statistical data
and country cases. Two arguments deserve to be highlighted: rst, Van Kersbergen and
Vis take issue with the broadly neo-institutionalist view that stasis rather than change is
what has characterized welfare states in the last 40 years or so, and that this is the main
puzzle in need of an explanation. They argue instead that change has been constant and
ubiquitous and that this was, in fact, the only way to secure the survival of the advanced
welfare state in the face of massive social and economic transformations. Explaining policy
change, not stasis, is what comparative research needs to address.
Here is where their second substantive claim comes in. The theoretical model that best
explains policy change across countries and policy subelds, they argue, is ‘open function-
alism’ (pp. 27–30 and chapter 6). The model is not easily summed up, since it operates with
necessary and sufcient conditions, and combines elements from functionalism, ideational
theories of policy learning and cognitive decision-making theories with more conventional
interest-based analysis of partisan actors. In a nutshell, open functionalism is based on the
premise that welfare state reform is essentially a problem-solving activity. In contrast to
purely constructivist thinking, material problems act as real constraints on policy-makers.
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (286–288)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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