| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Alexander Hicks. Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism: A Century of Income Security Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1999. pp. xii, 276. Cloth $42.50, paper $17.95.

This book by Alexander Hicks is a number-cruncher's delight, but it should be of interest to normal people as well because of its exceptional awareness of the entire range of literature on welfare programs. Its focus is on the changing levels of income-maintenance functions of governments, or income security programs, in a significant sample of industrial nations over the last one hundred years: that is, since Otto von Bismarck's social insurance reforms in the 1880s. The author's strategy is to test the claims made by various theories on the underlying causes for the differences in levels of income supports. Some of these theoretical frameworks are overlapping (and Hicks makes little effort to separate the overlaps), but, roughly speaking, we have "industrial society" theorists (the structural-functionalists) who claim that welfare programs are a requirement of all properly functioning industrial democracies; class theorists who claim that welfare programs are the results of class action (social democratic parties and/or trade union pressures); statist theorists who insist on the dominant roles of elites and institutions (welfare states); and pluralists who point to the electoral competition and the desire of politicians to renew and extend electoral support. . . .

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