This article addresses and expands on two points made by Robert Putnam in his recent study Making Democracy Work. The first concerns the observation that in order to find the cultural roots of Italian institution building, we may have to go further back in history than the 12th century, where Putnam stopped, and the second relates to the possible implications of this historical approach for the current transformation in the former Soviet bloc. The theoretical presentation revolves around the concepts of path dependence and multiple equilibria, finding much common ground between several of the social science disciplines. In conclusion it is argued that there may be cases of ‘pathological path dependence’, where public policy can have positive effects only if preceded by careful study of the anatomy of the pathological institutions that cause development traps.

Does political regime matter? Parallel analyses of Spanish public expenditure and taxation policies under the authoritarian Franco regime and in the current democracy, as well as of decision-making processes under both regimes, based upon extensive in-depth interviews with relevant government officials from 1974 to 1996, indicate that political regime characteristics can have a profound impact on both policy processes and outputs. Ruling out a ‘socioeconomic’ explanation, the author concludes that striking aberrations in state spending and taxation policies in the early 1970s were systematic products of unusual features of Franquist policy-making processes, which were directly linked to the authoritarian nature of the regime itself. Subsequently, democratization has been accompanied by dramatic changes in both policy processes and outputs.

This paper is concerned with the political determinants of the significantly different rates of welfare expenditure which characterise advanced capitalist countries. The research concentrates on the connections between the organization and mobilization of a key political actor pursing social wage benefits – the labour movement – and different levels across nations of welfare provision, including expenditure on health, social security consumption expenditure and social security transfers. The paper uses disaggregated, pooled time series data on welfare provision in 15 OECD countries, 1974–1988, to test the association between more comprehensive welfare state regimes and state structures that facilitate the intervention of organized labour movements in the policy process.