Social policy in rich and poor countries

Abstract

Abstract To what extent can the dramatic differences in social policy efforts in rich and poor countries be accounted for by genuinely political explanations? The hypothesis that is advanced in this article rests upon the combination of two schools of thought in comparative social policy analysis: socioeconomic models which focus attention on levels of economic wealth, need and demand for social security, and models of a comparative‐historiographic and political‐institutionalist nature. Empirical applications of socio‐economic models with lagged dependent variables reveal the existence of two deviant families of nations: overspenders in social policy (such as overspenders of social‐democratic complexion and of Christian‐democratic composition) and underspenders (such as superpowers in East and West as well as Japan and East Germany). The residuals mat can be derived from these models are amenable to an explanation which resides in comparative‐historiographic political analysis of social policy.