[2] What We Know about the Development of Social Policy

In 1975, two important quantitative comparative analyses of social policy were published. Harold Wilensky's The Welfare State andEquality addressed die differences in social spending efforts among sixty-odd countries in the 1960s and found that the level of economic development and die age of populations accounted for most of die variance in efforts. This study was the best and latest in a series of cross-sectional analyses of countries and American states that suggested that economic and social modernization pro-cesses determined social policy (review in Skocpol and Amenta 1986). The second study, David Collier and Richard Messick's "Prerequisites versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption," examined a similar group of countries, but with a wider time horizon, and addressed the adoption of social insurance policies. Their findings cast se-rious doubt on the modernization hypothesis, as well as on the strategy of generalizing from studies of many countries on social spending at a single point in time. Just a year earlier, Hugh Heclo had published Modern Social Politics and Britain and Sweden, one of the first studies to take a comparative and historical approach to the development of social policy. Previous versions of this essay were presented at the Conferences on Comparative Historica