The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United
States, Gregg M. Olsen, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. vi, 258This book presents a familiar puzzle in comparative politics: how are
we to understand variation in the design and scope of social programs and
substantive outcomes for citizens in the three welfare states under
scrutiny. As Olsen argues, all three cases are “advanced,
industrialized, and highly affluent capitalist nations…. and all
three nations enjoy average per capita incomes and standards of living
that are among the highest in the world” (10). Yet we find great
variation on a number of social indicators such as poverty levels, and
income and wealth disparities. All three have also “experienced
marked increases in inequality and welfare state retrenchment in recent
years” (11) but yet “they continue to differ along these
dimensions, even in the face of similar domestic strains and other
exogenous pressures related to global integration” (11). The
question is how do we account for the variation in the use of social
policy to assuage inequalities and respond to these exogenous
pressures.