The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. By Isabela Mares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 342p. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Since the 1970s, the power resources model has been the dominant approach to comparative studies of welfare state development. The strength of labor unions and left-wing political parties has been used to explain cross-national variation in both the structure and substance of modern social policies. However, in recent years, a number of scholars have challenged this labor-centered perspective by questioning the notion that capitalists uniformly oppose social insurance or that passage of meaningful reforms can only occur when business interests are politically marginalized.