Human reproduction and the rise of welfare states: An economic-demographic approach to welfare state formation in the United States and Sweden

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This article suggests that comparative welfare-state research would benefit from a closer analysis of economic-demographic factors, and that the United States and Sweden provide illuminating examples. In the early twentieth-century United States, economic prosperity and mass immigration favoured liberal attitudes of non-intervention in the sphere of reproduction: it was widely assumed that citizens would normally manage the critical states of life — such as motherhood, sickness, unemployment and old age — without public support. In Sweden, by contrast, the widespread experience of poverty, coupled with national backwardness and dramatic reproductive challenges (such as ageing, emigration and declining fertility), served to promote a broad support for state-interventionist policies.