Capitalism, democracy, and the welfare state

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dc.contributor.authorHEMERIJCK, Anton
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-07T13:43:26Z
dc.date.available2025-07-07T13:43:26Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.descriptionPublished online: 07 July 2025
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.description.sponsorshipThis 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).
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.citationInternational review of social history, 2025, OnlineFirst
dc.identifier.doi10.1017/S0020859025100540
dc.identifier.issn0020-8590
dc.identifier.issn1469-512X
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/92979
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherCambridge University Press
dc.relationWellbeing Returns on Social Investment Recalibration
dc.relation.ispartofInternational review of social history
dc.rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.licenseAttribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.titleCapitalism, democracy, and the welfare state
dc.typeArticle
dspace.entity.typePublication
person.identifier.other41937
relation.isAuthorOfPublication2b840b80-4cce-4635-8cd9-fdc80d275031
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery2b840b80-4cce-4635-8cd9-fdc80d275031
relation.isProjectOfPublication260ad733-0c09-44c8-ab14-ad138ec42615
relation.isProjectOfPublication.latestForDiscovery260ad733-0c09-44c8-ab14-ad138ec42615
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