Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

This article addresses the question of how ideas and interests can be linked in policy analysis. The juxtaposition of the two concepts is criticized from a sociological point of view. Instead, ideas are a substantial element of interest formation. Cognitive and normative worldviews shape the transformation of objective socio-economic positions into subjective, situational action orientations. Interests can be traced back to the interplay between structural positions, situational problems and their idea-based interpretation.

It is then shown how these conceptual arguments can bring forward a prominent debate in welfare state analysis: the role of business in the emergence of the American welfare state in the New Deal. While struggling with the question whether the supportive role of some business leaders in the Social Security Act of 1935 reveals substantial interest changes or strategical adaption, both sides of the debate suffer from an objectivist concept of interest. This one-sided concept of interest comes at the cost of leaving open the question of why business interests changed in the direction of unemployment insurance and not in the direction of other feasible institutional options such as price regulation or public works. These options would also have provided a solution to the problem American employers were facing. Analysis of social reform discourses between 1911 and 1935 shows that the partial reorientation of business people cannot be sufficiently explained without taking into account the growing legitimacy of liberal- corporatist ideas among employers in the 1920s.