Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state-church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.

Author: Kees Van Kersbergen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/06/2009
Pages: 318
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780521897914

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2010

About the Author
Van Kersbergen, Kees: - Kees van Kersbergen is a Professor of Political Science at VU University Amsterdam. He served as director of the Centre for Comparative Social Studies until 2007 and has also been professor of political science at the Radboud University (Nijmegen). He is the author of Social Capitalism (1995), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Social Science, and co-editor of Expansion and Fragmentation: Internationalization, Political Change and the Transformation of the Nation State (2014).Manow, Philip: - Philip Manow is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz. Previously, he was a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, and visiting fellow at the Centre for European Studies, Harvard, and at the Centre d'Études Européennes, Sciences Po, Paris. His work has been published in numberous journals and collections, including European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The New Politics of the Welfare State (2001), and Federalism and the Welfare State (2008).