As postwar welfare state accords unraveled in the 1970s, welfare state scholarship grew rapidly, with most scholars aiming to identify the determinants of policy variation and growth. Scholars typically debated the relative roles of economic and demographic factors, political configurations, and national attitudes and preferences. In subsequent decades, many researchers turned their attention from the determinants of welfare state development to the effects of social policies on varied social, economic, and behavioral outcomes. At the same time, a number of scholars moved away from social expenditures as the primary measure of welfare state effort and aimed instead to analyze the institutional features, or the architecture, of public provisions. Furthermore, scholars began to argue that the welfare state's causes and effects were, in fact, multidirectional. Welfare state features shape socioeconomic outcomes, political alliances, and preferences, and in turn are shaped and maintained by their own effects.

Steffen Mau's book draws on each of these recent shifts as it tackles its central question: To what extent do people's attitudes toward welfare state provisions derive from self-interested versus altruistic impulses and judgements, and how are those impulses and judgements shaped by actual welfare state designs?

Mau begins by establishing that legions of scholars have assumed and/or argued that citizens' approval of welfare state provision is largely instrumentalist. In short, people see the welfare state as legitimate when, and to the extent that, it enhances their own welfare. As Mau notes: “The material self-interest and self-regard of social groups have been served up as the master determinant for the analysis of welfare state stability and the political conflicts of welfare state restructuring” (p. 5). He observes that “it has been assumed that the distributive preferences of the people are aligned with the output structure of the welfare arrangement” (p. 20).

Mau, however, is skeptical that “pocket-book motives” have been the dominant factor. Drawing on the work of Albert Hirschmann, Amartya Sen, John Elster, Samuel Bowles, and others, he concludes that theories that rely on the explanatory power of self-interest alone neglect the crucial role of other factors that demonstrably influence people's orientations toward the welfare state: “Without other motivational sources of the normative kind, many of the welfare state assets which realize huge resource transfers between social groups would not be sustainable and would evoke strong resistance” (p. 20).

Mau's counteroffer is the logic of reciprocity. The citizens of developed welfare states are neither fully self-interested nor altruistic; they are instead (borrowing from Howard Becker) homo reciprocus. Reciprocity, in most cases, means that people expect some kind of reward for their efforts (such as the promise of protection) and a guarantee that transfers entail rights and obligations from both payer and recipient. The reciprocity perspective, he argues, requires that we pay careful attention to social programs' operating rules: “Emphasizing reciprocity as a vital principle in organizing and legitimizing welfare exchanges makes it clear that the reasons why people endorse transfer policies have to be located within the social logic of these exchanges themselves” (p. 35).

The heart of Mau's work, then, is his empirical analysis, which he reports in the sixth chapter. There, he links welfare state features in Britain and Germany (East and West separately, where possible) in five programmatic areas—“redistribution,” social assistance, unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, and health and sickness benefits—to self-reported attitudes and preferences regarding social provisions. Data on attitudes and preference come from three international data sets (the International Social Survey Programme, the Eurobarometer, and the International Social Justice Project) and two country-specific ones (the British Social Attitudes Survey and the German General Social Survey). In each of the five program areas, the author identifies the “implicit and sometimes explicit norms of reciprocity” (p. 89) embedded in the program design, and aims to clarify how various structural determinants account for British and German attitudes toward the collective welfare provisions in their countries.

Mau argues that the empirical evidence confirms that, in general, people accept welfare state programs when they are built on norms of reciprocity: “People are driven by a mix of motives and if the arrangements are morally plausible and perceived as fair in terms of sharing burdens and benefits they are also willing to make costly sacrifices” (p. 196). Norms of reciprocity are present to varying degrees across countries and across programs, and, not surprisingly, attitudes vary across both welfare regimes and welfare sectors.

Despite the methodological limits of a two-country study—three when East and West Germany are separated—Mau makes a persuasive case that welfare state designs “cause” attitudes; he has effectively marshaled several literatures as well as his own empirical evidence. The Moral Economy of Welfare States is a valuable resource for comparative welfare state scholars at the graduate level and above.

That said, the book also has some crucial weaknesses. Its central claim, a relatively narrow one, is repeated too often, quickly wearing out the reader. The writing is overly formal and, in addition, the author's (or copy editor's?) decision to present the entire book in the passive voice (“it has been argued that …”) was an unfortunate one. That construction is exhausting and, on too many occasions, I was unable to discern whether the author was discussing his own conclusions or that of another scholar.

More substantively, the book seems oddly disconnected from some contemporary issues that clearly affect acceptance of welfare state provisions. Other than a single (and extremely understated) observation about the Nazi period—“welfare policies also entailed a previously unpracticed discrimination policy excluding other ethnic groups” (p. 74)—Mau neglects immigration, ethnicity, and race, despite their increasing salience in both Britain and Germany. Furthermore, his empirical analysis omits the social programs that feminist welfare state scholars have so effectively brought to the fore in recent years—especially work–family reconciliation policies. This is an unfortunate omission, as the generosity and design of these policies are contested, and changing rapidly, in his study countries.