This is the best book on welfare states written for quite some time and indispensable reading for anyone working on or interested in the topic. Kees Van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis both have distinguished histories as welfare state scholars, and here their combined talents make a contribution to our understanding that is both advanced textbook and original analysis in form. The stated intent is to bring together in one place a critical consideration of much of the recent literature on social policy systems in advanced industrialized countries, and to answer some of the ‘big’ questions about why welfare states were created, why we still have them, and what they actually do. The enterprise is underpinned by the authors’ “open functional approach” to welfare state reform, which—though not without its problems—provides a solid theoretical basis for their arguments, and resurrects and modifies a framework for building theory that has fallen out of favor among many sociologists and political scientists.

In order to locate this book and its ambitions in the wider field of research, a short detour into the rather arcane world of welfare state analysis is required. The literature on the welfare state has been heavily influenced in recent years by two “master” theoretical perspectives. The first is the “power resources” approach pioneered by Walter Korpi and which focuses on class and class coalitions in explaining the construction of welfare state institutions and their redistributive outcomes. Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s work on classifying welfare systems according to their status creating and de-commodifying effects (identifying the social democratic, continental corporatist and liberal “worlds”) has shaped the ways several generations of sociologists and political scientists have conceptualized welfare states. It has also generated a somewhat fruitless debate on the empirical accuracy of the “three worlds of welfare” typology, often ignoring its ideal type basis and heuristic intentions. The second master perspective in welfare state analysis over the last several decades is that of historical institutionalism (HI), several of whose major proponents—Theda Skocpol, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen—have also been senior social policy scholars.

Arguably the debates around this latter approach have been richer and more edifying than those around “power resources”and especially the Esping-Anderson typology, with major developments occurring within and beyond the “hard core” of the HI welfare state research program. Pierson and Thelen have been important innovators from within the program—the first shifting to a broader political economy approach in work with Jacob Hacker, the latter advancing our understanding of institutional change—but there has also been significant input from those seeking to add alternative methods from outside. These include the independent and co-authored work of Barbara Vis on the use of prospect theory to revise Pierson’s contention that welfare state reform is always “risky” for governments, leading to reform evasion or blame avoidance (see Julia Lynch and Martin Rhodes, “Historical Institutionalism and the Welfare State” in Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia G. Falleti and Adam Sheingate (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, forthcoming 2016).

Two of the fields of research engaged with by Vis and Kersbergen are dominated by one or other of these master perspectives—that which focuses on the emergence, expansion, and cross-national variation of welfare state regimes studies (“power resources”), and that explaining the political and institutional resilience of welfare states (HI). Two other fields (studies of welfare crises and the conditions under which welfare reform occurs) are more peripheral to them. Vis and Kersbergen provide insights, both critical and constructive, into all of these sub-fields of welfare state research. They also grapple with approaches that have not gained much traction in mainstream welfare state analysis, especially ideational or cognitive approaches that argue for the (sometimes independent, sometimes ancillary) role of “ideas” in the trajectories of welfare state expansion and contraction. They also seek to accommodate within their “open functionalist” approach, the challenges and pressures for reform coming from the international environment (“globalization”) and the general shift towards post-industrialism across the advanced economies.

Although sacrificing much of the subtlety and scholarly care with which Van Kersbergen and Vis present their arguments, the key points can be summarized as follows. As far as existing approaches are concerned, the critique of core historical institutionalism articulated mainly in the work of Paul Pierson is that its inordinate focus on institutional resilience as stasis has neglected the constant reform and change that is required to make a welfare state resilient in the face “problem pressures.” The authors conceive of these as “objective” or “functional” problems (in that they “do not depend on political choice”) that may elicit an appropriate policy response, an inappropriate response, or perhaps no response at all. These problem pressures (pp. 28–9) create a “selective context” that will facilitate the adoption of certain ideas (this is as far as this book goes in accepting a role for ideational influence) but not others.

These problem pressures are linked to what Van Kersbergen and Vis call the four “rationales” or “logics” of welfare states, which structure the rise and development of welfare states as well as the “political opportunities and constraints of welfare reform” (p. 32): the logic of socio-economic development and modernization; the logic of political integration and state-building; the logic of need satisfaction and risk reapportioning; and the logic of class politics, coalitions, and redistribution. Chapters 4 through 8 of the book elaborate on these logics, linking them first to regime theory (a robust defense of Esping-Andersen’s “three worlds”), then to an assessment of what welfare states do, and an exploration of the endogenous and exogenous pressures for welfare state reform, including a lucid discussion of globalization and post-industrialism as sources of “functional problem pressure.” Chapter 9 uses prospect theory to explain why governments either evade or actively engage with those pressures to tackle unpopular reform, while Chapter 10 asks whether the welfare state will survive the recent recession. The authors answer “yes”—due to the popularity and ongoing success of social policies—even if the weight of reform pressures has increased and has led to retrenchment and expenditure cuts.

The analysis in this book is compelling and rewards a careful reading. This reader, however, was left with a number of questions, mainly about how successfully the authors navigate between the Scylla of political agency and the Charybdis of functional determinism. Their “open functional approach” seeks to steer them through these perilous waters by making much of reform pressures, but also much of the agency of policy makers in responding to them, an agency which is shaped by a combination of ideas and their calculations about the potential electoral damage of risky reform. While the authors accept the notion that “causal beliefs” play a role in decision making, they repudiate the notion that ideas have a context-free independent effect and create by themselves the incentives for action and inaction—an argument that I share.

We are left, however, with a rather mechanistic notion of change and reform, and where it comes from which can be characterized as “problem pressure + political calculation +/- room for electoral maneuver + ideas = reform.” But are ideas just “policy ideas,” that become useful in the face of reform pressure, or are they part of a broader, more inchoate (and less “means-end” rational) ideology? I assume the latter. But in that case—and as one can easily observe in US and UK politics, and beyond—is ideology (in its liberal-market, right-wing, and sometimes explicitly anti-welfare manifestations) not also a “problem pressure” for the welfare-loving center left (and its academic exponents), one that is subjective, and not objective, and often unrelated to, and even refuting “functional demands” on policy? Ideology as a motivating force can have a profound impact on the shape and extent of redistribution and protection from social risk, pushing for either greater redistribution or greater retrenchment,even in the absence of “functional problem pressures,”or exceeding what those “pressures” may demand. Despite the brilliance of this book, I am not convinced that the authors have grappled as effectively as they might with this core phenomenon in welfare state politics.