To elaborate these arguments and demonstrate the particular effects of American institutions on agricultural policymaking, Sheingate adopts a long historical perspective—from the 1860s through the close of the twentieth century—and contrasts developments in U.S. agricultural policy over this period with those in two countries with quite different institutional structures: France and Japan. The first objective is to demonstrate the interrelationships among the respective American and Japanese/French institutional structures of dispersed versus concentrated political authority, pluralist versus corporatist farm group representation, and separated versus aligned political party and farm group relations. The second goal is to show how these institutional relationships have affected governments' abilities to develop the “agricultural welfare state.”

Sheingate argues that four phases are common to all three countries and present “a distinct policy task that requires different relations between government and farmers” (p. 21): the era of promotional policies (1860s to 1910s), market intervention and production controls (1920s to 1940s), a mature subsidy regime (1950s and 1960s), and retrenchment (1970s onward). U.S. institutions, he maintains, facilitated the first and last phases and frustrated the second and third. The policy effects of the French and Japanese institutional frameworks were just the opposite, enabling market intervention and a mature subsidy regime but handicapping retrenchment policies.

This historical and comparative analysis is well executed. Although the national agricultural policy expert is unlikely to learn anything new—the discussion of Japanese and French agricultural policies draws heavily on secondary sources, and English sources alone in the case of Japan—the book makes a contribution by virtue of its historical sweep and the quality of research. Analyses are well documented, with good use of summary tables and figures to capture distinctive expenditure patterns, structural transformations in agriculture, and agricultural representation in national legislatures.

The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State is not without limitations. In contrast to other historical institutionalists who seek to examine the role of ideas in policy making, as factors in their own right and in interaction with institutions, Sheingate makes no such attempt. The analyses here are resolutely structural, save for an occasional nod to the role of exogenous factors, such as the state of the economy and international developments. The author dismisses the possibility of ideational differences between the U.S. and Japan/France regarding agriculture's contribution to the public good (p. 36), and he makes no effort to examine the role they play in agricultural policy outcomes across the three countries. Institutions bear virtually all the explanatory weight for policy outcomes and government policy capabilities. To carry the burden, they are sometimes miscast (e.g., the relationship between French farm groups and the state is described as more corporatist than the reality of plural and competing farm groups warrants), and their importance is overplayed. An example of the latter is the claim regarding the significance of links between French conservative parties and the dominant farm group. There is evidence that the power of the French farm lobby transcends the ideology of the governing party, which suggests the need for an argument that goes beyond the organizational strength of French farmers and their linkages to political parties. It requires recognition of the role that ideas about the multifunctionality of agriculture play in agrarian politics in France and the European Union more generally.

On occassion, theory-building and empirical data are not fully compatible. Sheingate constructs a careful theoretical argument on how the U.S. institutional framework facilitated retrenchment of agricultural policies whereas the French and Japanese frameworks thwarted it. Retrenchment policies, he argues, require frameworks like the American system that facilitate blame avoidance, venue change, and entrepreneurship. But the argument is problematic empirically, undermined by expenditure data—Sheingate's chief indicator of retrenchment—subsequent to the 1996 agricultural reforms, which demonstrate sharp escalations in government transfers to American farmers. Expenditure data are only a partial measure of a government's capacity to effect radical reforms, and Sheingate's undue reliance on them undermines the strength of his own claims about the policy autonomy afforded governments by the American agricultural institutional framework. To his credit, Sheingate stresses the contingency of radical policy reform in the U.S. institutional framework and the role of exogenous factors, but he remains adamant that interest group “capture” is impossible in this institutional context (p. 239). The reservation of that appellation to state–farm group relations in Japan and France is probably not unwarranted. At least in the instance of Japan, however, it lacks the nuance of a relationship under stress as detailed by Aurelia George Mulgan, a leading authority on Japanese agrarian politics (The Politics of Agriculture in Japan, 2000).

These examples illustrate the book's capacity to provoke. They do not diminish its theoretical and empirical contribution to comparative public policy and to our understanding of the effect of institutions on policymaking and policy reform.