Chapter 1 has analyzed the main reasons for the recent resurgence of interest in the study of employers by comparative political economists (Hall and Soskice 2001a, Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997, Crouch and Streeck 1997, Kitschelt et al. 1999). Employers occupy again a central stage in most comparative studies of public policy after a long period of time in which debates about the role of business in modern capitalist societies “had reached an intellectual cul-de-sac” and in which labor-centered or state-centered analyses occupied a prominent place (Pierson and Hacker 2000: 1). The new business-centered literature resolves many of the intractable analytical questions that were the subject of heated debates among pluralists and neo-Marxists during the 1960s and 1970s. It has made significant progress in identifying the sources of cross-national differences in the preferences and organizational capabilities of employers and the role of business in the development of wage-bargaining institutions, institutions of corporate governance, policies of training and skill formation, and industrial policies (Culpepper 1998, Gordon 1994, Jacoby 1997, Martin 1995a, 2000, Pontusson and Swenson 1996, Swenson 1991, 2002, Soskice 1994, 1997, Thelen 2000, Thelen and Kume 1999, Ziegler 2000). The goal of this chapter is to develop a framework that allows us to specify the role played by employers in the development of policies of social insurance.