The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United States, Gregg M. Olsen, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. vi, 258

This book presents a familiar puzzle in comparative politics: how are we to understand variation in the design and scope of social programs and substantive outcomes for citizens in the three welfare states under scrutiny. As Olsen argues, all three cases are “advanced, industrialized, and highly affluent capitalist nations…. and all three nations enjoy average per capita incomes and standards of living that are among the highest in the world” (10). Yet we find great variation on a number of social indicators such as poverty levels, and income and wealth disparities. All three have also “experienced marked increases in inequality and welfare state retrenchment in recent years” (11) but yet “they continue to differ along these dimensions, even in the face of similar domestic strains and other exogenous pressures related to global integration” (11). The question is how do we account for the variation in the use of social policy to assuage inequalities and respond to these exogenous pressures.