This is an ambitious book. Focusing on 21 middle-income countries from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman extend the kind of analysis of welfare regimes pioneered by Gøsta Esping-Andersen for the advanced industrial countries. In many respects, their project echoes Esping-Andersen's pioneering study The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990): They develop a typology of welfare states; they locate their analysis of these welfare states in a broader context of public policy, linking the provision of welfare programs to other social policies (especially public education) and to development strategies more broadly; they combine quantitative analysis of cross-national statistical data with more qualitative analysis of historical processes; and they chart both the genesis and subsequent transformations of different types of welfare states across the course of the twentieth century.

The authors demonstrate that the three selected regions developed distinctive models of social welfare as part of broader social policy and development strategies. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian regimes expanded occupational social insurance into a “highly comprehensive” system (p. 16), covering almost everyone and entailing a degree of redistribution that is unexpected in nondemocracies. In Latin America, “the urban middle class and some blue-collar workers enjoyed access to relatively generous systems of public protection, but peasants and informal-sector workers were generally excluded or underserved” (p. 1). East Asian welfare systems were relative laggards, except with respect to public education.

All three models underwent reform amid economic crisis and democratization at the end of the twentieth century, but they did so in distinctive ways, just as Esping-Andersen and others have argued for the advanced industrial countries. Those countries faced varied economic and fiscal constraints, allowing them different space to reform, as well as different political pressures arising from their existing welfare policies. Reforms were, to a considerable extent, path dependent. In Eastern Europe, states faced severe economic and fiscal difficulties, but the space for reform was circumscribed by the widely and deeply rooted popular commitment to quasi-universal systems. In Latin America, similarly, the urban middle and working classes resisted any diminution of their privileges. Latin American states experienced fiscal and economic constraints but, at the same time, faced rising political pressures to extend welfare benefits to other social groups. The result was, often, highly targeted social assistance. In East Asia, with the exception of the Philippines, states had the resources to meet generally weak demands for the expanded public provision of welfare.

These models of social welfare were associated with similarly distinctive development strategies. Haggard and Kaufman argue that “the development strategies of governments, and the resultant production strategies of firms, are complementary to particular social policies and labor-market institutions” (2). In Latin America, for example, import-substitution industrialization, or ISI, “allowed state enterprises and private firms in the import-substituting sectors to accommodate welfare entitlements for the organized working class”—but at the same time reinforced the disadvantages of the urban and especially rural poor, thereby reducing “the incentives for governments, firms, and workers to invest in education” (p. 9). The result was that Latin American welfare states were “deep but not wide,” with substantial but very inegalitarian expenditure (p. 12). In export-oriented East Asia, in contrast, “governments and firms [were] highly resistant to social insurance schemes that would increase labor costs,” but had strong incentives to invest in education (pp. 9–10).

Development, Democracy, and Welfare States transforms the comparative study of welfare states or regimes outside of the advanced industrial countries. While it is not the first comparative study in this field, and it relies on existing country- and region-specific literatures, it goes much further than its predecessors in integrating a detailed and original analysis of cross-national statistical data into an excellent synthesis of existing literature.

Path dependence is central to Haggard and Kaufman's analysis. The political accommodation or exclusion of urban labor and the rural poor in the early postwar period served to set countries in the three regions down divergent paths toward different kinds of welfare states. The corollary of path dependence, rooted in domestic political conditions, is that the effects of specific political institutions and economic changes are often far from uniform. Democratization generally resulted in an expansion of welfare states, but authoritarian regimes sometimes had their own reasons for forging redistributive social contracts with at least some of their citizens. Political parties of both the Right and Left adopted very varied positions with respect to expanding or reforming welfare systems. Globalization has diverse consequences, and economic growth can stimulate the expansion of social welfare as much as, or more than, economic crisis.

Haggard and Kaufman cover a huge amount of material on an impressive number and range of countries. Inevitably, there are topics that are neglected. The relationship between welfare state formation and development strategies is described as “complementary,” but the authors do not have the space to interrogate the actual relationship in any given case between choosing development strategies and making choices around welfare models. Nor do they have the space to examine in much detail, for any individual country, the “discontinuities” in “the composition of the political elite and in the political and legal status of labor and peasant organizations and mass political parties” (p. 45) that explain the paths pursued by each country. The authors neglect the period before 1945, when countries took their first steps down distinct paths. The book's approach also precludes any detailed consideration of the roles played by ideas and actors crossing national borders, whether in the middle part of the century (when the International Labor Organization played an important role) or the latter part (when the World Bank arguably did likewise). Haggard and Kaufman are also coy about comparing explicitly their typology with other typologies, whether of the advanced industrial countries of the global North or of industrializing and less industrialized countries in the postcommunist world and global South.

Despite these limits, Development, Democracy, and Welfare States makes an enormous contribution to the field of comparative political economy.