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Capitalism, democracy, and the welfare state
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0020-8590; 1469-512X
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International review of social history, 2025, OnlineFirst
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HEMERIJCK, Anton, Capitalism, democracy, and the welfare state, International review of social history, 2025, OnlineFirst - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92979
Abstract
This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology; Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century; Peter H. Lindert’s Making Social Spending Work; and Ayşe Buğra’s Social Policy in Capitalist History. All these books reveal the independent effect of historical political factors on the rise of the welfare state across advanced capitalist democracies. Contrary to received wisdom, the central argument put forward is that there is no trade-off between capitalism and democracy and, more importantly, that the welfare state has become an existentially important lubricant buttressing both advanced capitalism and liberal democracy.
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Published online: 07 July 2025
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This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025). This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 882276).