The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies since 19601

In the last generation, social scientists have made great advances in understanding the forces behind the welfare state-or public social spending and provision. Scholars have asked why those aided by the state get what they do in the ways that they do for a number of circumstances affecting income and life chances. Typically, the object of study has been the state's efforts through spending or services to ameliorate routine and foreseeable predicaments that threaten income, such as those caused by old age, unemployment, ill health, disability, and industrial accidents. Often scholars have widened the focus to include programs aiding persons with family obligations and citizens having served in the military. Sometimes housing, nutritional, and educational needs have been included, expanding the definition of the welfare state to encompass almost all domestic public spending. Researchers have explored many empirical settings to derive and appraise arguments about public social provision. Influential early work (e.g., Marshall 1963; Titmuss 1958; Peacock and Wiseman 1961) focused on post-World War I1 Britain's adoption of comprehensive public social provision and the term the "welfare state." These studies argued that the inevitable expansion of citizen rights or, alternatively, social solidarities forged in war promoted public social provision. Soon, however, social scientists began quantitative, cross-sectional studies of all the countries of the post-World War I1 world (e.g., Cutright 1965; Wilensky 1975) and typically found that socioeconomic "modernization," notably industrialization and the aging of the population, underlay social spending progress. In addition, U.S. states were used as laboratories to test propositions about social policy-mainly whether economic modernization or