Welfare Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 1950-1980

This paper addresses long-standing debates over the role of demographic structure, class power, class-based political parties, and democraphic political participation in the growth of the welfare state in advance industrial democracies from 1950 to 1980. It distinguishes four theories-industrialism, monopoly capitalism, social democratic, and interest-group politics-and tests them using pooled, cross-sectional, time-series data for 18 nations and seven time points. Total social welfare spending, composed primarily of social insurance benefits, is dominated by the size of the aged population, smaller but important effect of nonclass political variables such as voting participation and electoral competition, and interaction of age with political and other variables. Public assistance, means-tested programs, however, are dominated by class variables. Although evaluation of the theories must consider the domain of programs to which each best applies, the results generally favor an interest-group-politics theory, which posits the dominant influence of demographic and political factors.