Despite recent advances in poverty reduction, extreme inequalities persist in access to basic social services such as safe water, healthcare, and education. While some countries and regions provide a wide range of public goods, others remain mired in conflict and widespread poverty, with little prospect for improvement. In Coalitions of the Well-Being, Joel Selway argues that such striking variation results from how electoral institutions interact with social structures in shaping incentives for politicians to provide public goods, and tests this hypothesis with an analysis of health policy in developing countries. The result is a conceptually rigorous, methodologically eclectic, and empirically informed book that represents an important contribution to the literature.

The insight that social cleavages are a powerful driver of social policy is well-established in existing research. A key finding is that ethnic fragmentation has a negative effect on public good provision. In highly fragmented societies, ethnicity is more likely to be salient in politics, and public policy tends to provide targeted benefits rather than broad-based social services. Selway challenges this view by arguing that ethnic fractionalization in itself does not lead to social divisions. First, what matters is whether ethnic cleavages are “cross-cutting.” When members of an ethnic group are similar to out-group members in other dimensions, such as income or religion, it is easier to identify policies that appeal to multiple ethnic groups, and ethnicity becomes less salient.

Second, ethnic cleavages and their geographic configuration interact with electoral institutions to shape social policy. In highly homogeneous countries, electoral systems based on proportional representation tend to perform better in providing public goods, because they facilitate the emergence of political parties with a geographically dispersed support base. By contrast, majoritarian electoral systems are better in countries where ethnicity is salient and ethnic groups are geographically intermixed, because majoritarianism provides incentives for ethnic groups to coordinate across districts on common policy platforms. Finally, in countries where ethnic divisions are salient and ethnic groups are geographically segregated, both types of electoral systems favor the delivery of targeted benefits, which may exacerbate ethnic tensions and escalate into violent conflict.

After an introductory chapter, the book clarifies key concepts in chapter 2, where Selway also shows that there is no systematic relationship between electoral institutions and social structure. The following chapter develops the theoretical framework, which is then tested in chapter 4 with a quantitative analysis of panel data from ninety countries. The remainder of the book presents a series of case studies that examine the mechanisms through which electoral rules and social factors interact to shape public good provision. Chapters 5 and 6 test the theory in the ethnically homogenous societies of Thailand, Botswana, and New Zealand, and chapters 7 and 8 study health policy in the ethnically fragmented countries of Mauritius and Malaysia. Chapters 9 and 10, while not performing an analysis of any policy domain, offer interesting remarks on electoral systems in countries with geographically isolated ethnic groups.

The contributions of Coalitions of the Well-Being to research on institutions and ethnic politics are clear, and the case of electoral reform in Thailand is especially illuminating in identifying the nexus between institutional change and policy outcomes. In discussing the implications of his findings, however, Selway could have broadened the scope of his analysis to engage with the comparative literature on welfare state regimes. While most research on the subject focuses on post-industrial societies, a growing scholarship studies varieties of welfare states in low- and middle-income countries, and it suggests a close relationship between social policy and historical legacies of capitalist expansion, industrialization strategy, and incorporation into the global economy. As such legacies may have implications for the emergence of cross-cutting cleavages and institutional formation, Selway could have elaborated on how his analysis relates to this research.

Some readers will also find that the strong analytical focus on party systems is not always helpful, especially for cases where political parties are weak. For example, Selway correctly notes that party registration rules ensured the emergence of multi-ethnic parties in Indonesia (chapter 10). However, the same rules (especially the transition between 2004 and 2009 to an open-list proportional representation system, not discussed in the chapter) are fully compatible with high levels of targeted spending on ethno-regional lines, which indeed is a key feature of the Indonesian political system today. Selway's suggestion that broad, multi-ethnic parties may help provide high levels of public goods in sub-Saharan Africa thus appears a bit too optimistic (p. 239).

This carefully researched book reminds us to be wary of “one-size-fits-all” approaches to development policy that do not seriously consider domestic politics as a key moderating factor of the nexus between institutions and policy outcomes. It will be especially interesting for scholars working on electoral institutions, ethnic politics, and health policy.