The Comparative History of Public Policy

This book looks at the public policy profiles of eight advanced capitalist states and asks what makes them distinctive. The volume also examines national policies comparatively by exploring the extent to which each nation fits into patterns established in cross-national literature. The authors seek to integrate a historical examination of individual case studies with the structural analysis that emerges from a comparative approach. In so doing they produced an authoritative statement on the developments and dilemmas of central areas of public life in the modern state.

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Puzzles of Political Economy (Francis G Castles)

2. Social Protection by Other Means: Australia's Strategy of Coping With External Vulnerability (Francis G Castles)

3. Learning from Catastrophes: West Germany's Public Policy (Manfred G Schmidt)

4. The Comparative History of Public Policy in Israel (Michael Shalev)

5. `Pillarisation' and `Popular Movements' Two Variants of Welfare State Capitalism: The Netherlands and Sweden (Gordan Therborn)

6. Japan's Creative Conservatism: Continuity Under Challenge (T J Pempel)

7. The United Kingdom: Paradoxes of an Ungrounded Statism (Patrick Dunleavy)

8. Taking Exception: Explaining the Distinctiveness of American Public Policies in The Past Century (Edwin Amenta and Theda Skopol)

Notes on Contributors.

Francis G. Castles is Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and at the Center for Social Policy Research (CeS) in Bremen.