Life can be very pleasant in democratic countries. The state provides schools and hospitals, roads and bridges, parks and libraries and sometimes it even subsidises opera and sport. But consider the following:

• Will the state help you through university?

• What happens if you are ill or disabled or unable to find a job? Will the state help you?

• What about those who are too young or too old to work? Should the state support them?

• What of the poor and vulnerable? For that matter, who is poor and vulnerable?

Welfare state policies are based on the redistribution of resources between parts of the population: taxes and contributions are collected from citizens who can afford to pay and the money is used to support those in need. A detailed list of welfare state provisions would be long in most countries, and the administration of even the simplest of them is exceedingly complex. The politics of the ‘taking and giving’ that the welfare state involves is also highly controversial and the source of fierce political debate. We cannot cover all aspects of welfare state arrangements in one chapter, so we focus on the most typical ones and use them to illustrate the ways in which democratic states try to improve the well-being of their citizens and redistribute resources between them.