Abstract
In the last two decades, the prevailing orthodoxy in comparative studies has been the sociological view that public policy outcomes are primarily a reflection of what can loosely be described as ‘environmental’ factors: the demographic structure of the population, the incremental logic of policy programmes, and, most important of all, the level of economic development. This paper has two main objectives: first, to demonstrate that the sociological orthodoxy is methodologically and empirically unsound in its central tenet that politics does not matter, and, second, to provide a more detailed, and political, explanation of the particularly high levels of public welfare provision that characterize the Scandinavian countries.
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