Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T11:22:05.791Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The American Welfare State in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2006

Jonas Pontusson
Jonas Pontusson
Affiliation:
Princeton University ([email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. By Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 262 pages. $55.00 cloth

Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why “Americans are much less willing to redistribute from the rich to the poor than Europeans” (2) or, in other words, why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). This essay was written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. I am most grateful to the foundation for its support. For comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Ira Katznelson, Mary O'Sullivan, and Kenneth Sokoloff.

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 315 - 326
Copyright
© 2006 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001. Why doesn't the United States have a European-style welfare state? Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2001(2): 187–254.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Peter. 1990. The Politics of Social Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carstairs, Andrew McLaren. 1980. A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Cusack, Thomas, Torben Iversen, and Philipp Rehm. 2005. “Risks at work: The demand and supply sides of redistribution.” Presented at the conference on Democracy, Inequality and Representation, Syracuse University, May 6–7.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Estevez-Abe, Margarita, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice. 2001. Social protection and the formation of skills. In Varieties of Capitalism, eds. Peter Hall and David Soskice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferrie, Joseph. 2005. History lessons: The end of American exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States since 1850. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(3): 199–215.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Hicks, Alexander. 1999. Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Huber, Evelyne, and John Stephens. 2001. Development and Crisis of the Welfare State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Immergut, Ellen. 1992. Health Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Iversen, Torben, and David Soskice. 2005. “Electoral institutions, parties and the politics of class.” Presented at the conference on Democracy, Inequality and Representation, Syracuse University, May 6–7.
Katzenstein, Peter. 1985. Small States in World Markets. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Korpi, Walter. 1978. The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Lee, Woojin, and John Roemer. 2004. “Racism and redistribution in the United States.” Presented at the Workshop on Wealth and Power in the Post-Industrial Age, Yale University, January 29–30.
Lindert, Peter. 2004. Growing Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mares, Isabella. 2003. The Politics of Social Risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meltzer, Allan, and Scott Richard. 1981. A rational theory of the size of government. Journal of Political Economy 89 (5): 914–27.Google Scholar
Moene, Karl Ove, and Micahel Wallerstein. 2001. Inequality, social insurance and redistribution. American Political Science Review 95 (4): 859–74.Google Scholar
OECD. 2004a. Trends in International Migration.
OECD. 2004b. Social expenditure database. www.oecd.org/els/social/expenditure.
Pierson, Paul, ed. 2001. The New Politics of the Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pontusson, Jonas. 2005. Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe versus Liberal America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rodrik, Dani. 1997. Has Globalization Gone Too Far? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.
Stephens, John. 1979. The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. London: MacMillan.
Swank, Duane. 2002. Global Capital, Political Institutions and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swenson, Peter. 2002. Capitalist against Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tanzi, Vito, and Ludger Schuknecht. 2000. Public Spending in the 20th Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Kersbergen, Kees. 1995. Social Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Wallerstein, Michael. 1989. Union organization in advanced industrial democracies. American Political Science Review 83(2): 483–501.Google Scholar
Wilensky, Harold. 2002. Rich Democracies. Berkeley: University of California Press.