Democracy and Social Welfare

Abstract

Democratic government and generous social provisions are both critical qualities of good societies, at least in the prevailing views in most rich countries. Democracy and social welfare policies are also interrelated. While social policy can thrive in authoritarian polit ical systems, democracies often present specif ically favorable conditions for sustainable social provisions. In turn, the growth of social welfare states was arguably supportive of the consolidation of democratic rule in Western Europe after the Second World War. The two books under review make important contri butions to the causal analysis of democratic governance and social welfare policies. Both enter crowded fields of scholarship, and in both fields substantial progress has been made in past decades (Amenta 2003; Mahoney 2003). Charles Tilly's Democracy builds on a life time of work on state formation and gover nance; revolutions; contention and collective violence; as well as trust relations; inequality; and more. In addition, this book, together with his earlier work on Durable Inequality (1998), represents the fruition of a shift in Tilly's analytic strategy: from a theoretically oriented pursuit of important historical ques tions to a more formal-if still richly informed by history-use of mechanism hypotheses as tools of causal explanation. For both reasons, Democracy meets with great expectations and deserves a close reading. Tilly focuses on processes of democratiza tion, de-democratization, and on degrees of democracy rather than on the attainment or the loss of a defined state of affairs called democracy: Democratization . . . consists of an increase in conformity between state behavior and citizens' expressed demands (p. 140). This conformity is specified in four dimensions: as the degree to which there exists broad, equal, and mutually binding consultation of the citizenry by the state, and Democracy, by Charles Tiy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 234pp. $19.99 paper. ISBN: 9780521701532.