Tomasz Inglot provides the first comparative historical study of welfare state development in the formerly communist region of East Central Europe (ECE). He focuses on three states—Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia (the Czech Republic and Slovakia since 1993)—tracing their social insurance institutions from Bismarckian origins early in the century, through the political struggles of the interwar period, communism and postcommunist democratization, ending with their accession to the European Union in 2004. The book is exceptionally well researched and thorough, based on extensive original research, fieldwork, and new data. It contributes greatly to our knowledge about these little-studied welfare states throughout a turbulent century. Inglot proposes explanations for welfare state development in ECE that are at once theoretically grounded and in critical dialogue with existing literature.

The book's main argument is that ECE welfare states have been critically shaped by institutional and policy legacies, the first defined as laws, regulations, organizations, and institutional blueprints, the second as patterns of government action and reform attempts, all dating back to the imperial and interwar periods. These legacies are both unique to each state and enduring, constraining change, producing patterns of institutional “layering” and adaptation while blocking radical reform. Inglot rejects the commonly held view that communist-era welfare states conformed to a single model, stressing instead divergence across the three cases in institutional and program design and distributive outcomes throughout the decades. He contrasts an uneven pattern of social policy development in ECE with a linear trajectory in Western Europe, showing that while in the West welfare states grew steadily over three postwar decades, in ECE each state underwent recurrent cycles of expansion and retrenchment. These cycles resulted from ECE governments' responses to periodic economic and political crises, a pattern that turned their welfare states into “‘permanent construction sites’ [that] may never emerge as firmly consolidated ‘regime types’” (p. 307). Inglot develops an original characterization of them as “emergency welfare states,” specific to the ECE region.

The study is framed within the theoretical literature on comparative welfare state development, adopting a historical-institutionalist and path-dependent approach over those that stress political resources or economic pressures. The argument specifies the effects of institutional and policy legacies, stressing differences in the timing of the introduction and completion of welfare states, in their decision-making and administrative structures, and in agents and modes of transmission, particularly learning, feedback and self-reinforcement of inherited policy patterns among small groups of decision makers. Empirical sections cover the development of Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Polish welfare states over eight decades, placing them within their larger political and socioeconomic contexts. Inglot knows these cases in great depth, and the narrative is complex, richly detailed, and illustrated with much original data, providing an excellent first treatment in English, especially of the interwar and World War II periods.

The evidence persuades that Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia have had distinctive welfare states before, during, and after the communist period, despite the Soviet government's efforts to impose a Stalinist model, post-Stalin reforms, and the more recent, liberalizing campaigns of the international financial institutions. Inglot shows how differences were largely preserved in repeated renegotiations among social policy experts, government officials, political elites, and, in some cases, popular actors, and how the outcomes affected distribution and equity for state employees, workers, rural populations, women, pensioners, and families. Although it is impossible to summarize the multiple differences briefly, at the broadest level the Czechoslovak welfare state has been well coordinated, relatively generous, and effective; the Hungarian poorly coordinated and “maternalist,” that is, most generous with child and family benefits; and the Polish most affected by social crises and comparatively substandard. For the postcommunist period, Inglot argues that welfare state change in ECE has been bounded, that (except in Slovakia) radical restructuring has largely failed, a view that, though controversial, is accepted by many experts.

Welfare States in East-Central Europe is a major contribution to the growing literature that seeks to extend serious comparative study of welfare states beyond the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which remains the focus of most existing research. Inglot shows both the value and limits of this literature for analyzing cases that have suffered much greater political and economic instability than OECD states, and he develops a new analytical framework that stresses cyclical patterns and emergency responses in welfare policy. Although he applies these concepts only to the ECE region, it would be interesting to consider whether they extend to other unstable regions. The book's argument also connects to the growing scholarly interest in authoritarian welfare states, implying that social policy legacies are transmitted by similar mechanisms through both democratic and authoritarian periods, a point that merits further elaboration.

The book addresses major debates in the literatures of comparative politics, comparative welfare states, and postcommunist transitions. On a broad conceptual level, it contributes to scholarship on determinants and mechanisms of institutional reproduction. In the key debate over the explanatory power of political resource, rational choice, economic, and institutionalist factors in welfare state development, Inglot's focus on historical legacies and continuity puts him in critical dialogue with the work of scholars, such as Mitchell Orenstein, Katharina Muller, and others, who place more emphasis on postcommunist policy change and assign more weight to economic and especially international factors.

Inglot does leave the reader somewhat unclear about his position here, acknowledging that after 1989, “exogenous factors, primarily international organizations … politics, ideology, public opinion … all influenced the process of welfare state reform in Eastern and Central Europe in a variety of meaningful ways” (pp. 213–14). But he gives the reader little indication how much explanatory weight might be assigned to these factors relative to institutional and policy legacies. By contrast, Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman's broad comparative study, Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe (2008), which also emphasizes path dependency and bounded change in ECE, gives more explicit attention to economic and political determinants, while other recent studies point to various mixes of historical and contemporary domestic and international factors.

Inglot's book has a few perhaps unavoidable limitations. It focuses almost entirely on social insurance institutions and cash payments—specifically pensions, sickness and maternity benefits, family and child allowances—leaving aside other major dimensions of the welfare state—health care, education, housing, social assistance—which, as the author acknowledges (p. 42), may have different causal factors. The study also suffers from the “too many variables, too few cases” problem that is endemic to the small-n case study approach, examining a number of hypotheses with evidence from only a few welfare states, though it does effectively illustrate causal relationships for those cases.

In the end, these are relatively minor issues. Welfare States in East Central Europe is ambitious, conceptually innovative, and largely successful in providing an original and convincing historical-institutional account. It “brings history back in,” reinterpreting the development of ECE welfare states across different political regimes and integrating them into the comparative literature on welfare expansion and retrenchment, as well as on broader institutionalist theory. It adds greatly to our knowledge about their early development and engages contemporary debates about the extent and determinants of postcommunist reform. The book will be of great value to scholars who share these interests.