The subtitle of this book—The Politics of Distribution in Democracies—addresses a subject of great interest in recent decades. In most wealthy democracies, welfare states have come under considerable financial pressure, while during the same period, much of the developing world has experienced democratic transitions. A welcome feature of the book is that it includes contributions on both developed and developing democracies. Divide and Deal consists of a brief introduction and 11 chapters, grouped into sections on the effects of institutions, the distributive preferences of individuals, and interest group and coalitional politics.

The individual chapters are of high quality, and many raise intriguing questions for further research. A problem, typical of many edited volumes, however, is that the contributions do not cohere into a general theoretical contribution or a distinctive thematic conclusion.

The first five chapters examine the effects of institutions. More could have been done to exploit the general issues implicit in each of these chapters, although each stands alone as an interesting contribution. Chapters by Isabela Mares and Steffen Ganghof deal with financial constraints in contemporary countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Mares shows how the maturation of welfare states reduces the incentives and ability of unions to restrain wage demands in order to maintain employment. As the share of taxes in total labor costs increases and as more benefits flow to “outsiders,” unions are less willing to trade wage restraint for increased welfare benefits, and wage restraint in turn has a less powerful effect on the labor market. Ganghof examines trade-offs between progressive taxes on income from wages and the need to restrain taxes on investment income. Political and monitoring costs reduce the efficiency of maintaining dual tax structures; and in a context of global integration, this strengthens incentives to move toward flatter overall tax structures.

The other chapters in this section focus on developing or postcommunist countries. Jeremy Seekings distinguishes among welfare regimes that prioritize agricultural development policies and family solidarity networks and those skewed toward the provision of social insurance to formal sector workers. A third type of regime—labeled “pauperist”—targets social assistance directly to the poor. Democratization, Seekings argues, encourages greater emphasis on this third, relatively progressive, set of policies, subject to the constraints generated by prior welfare commitments. Nicoli Natrass's quantitative analysis of access to antiretroviral treatment for AIDS implicitly calls into question Seeings's cautious conclusion about the effects of democratization. Natrass shows that country wealth plays a more important role than democracy.

The chapter by Jana Kuricova takes us in a different direction with an examination of the effects of institutional design in new democratic systems. Kuricova's analysis of roll-call votes in the Russian Duma shows that the effects of single-member districts and party-list proportional representation are similar to those found in more institutionalized democracies. Representatives elected on party lists are less inclined to support “pork” projects than are those representing local constituencies.

The three chapters on individual preferences provide the most coherent overall focus. They each address the paradox that such preferences can rarely be understood simply on the basis of a “self-interested” economic calculus, and their explanations differ in interesting ways. Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage argue that religious beliefs (irrespective of denomination) function as a psychological substitute for social protection, and thus reduce the demand for redistribution. Evidence for their claim comes from comparisons of social spending among the 50 U.S. states and cross-nationally, and from U.S. survey data showing an inverse relation between preferences for social insurance and religious observance. The formal model elaborated in the chapter by Woojin Lee and John Roemer provides an alternative view. These authors argue that voting choices derive not from the psychic gains of religiosity but from issue bundling (where social values trump redistributive preferences), or from beliefs (consistent with the “Protestant ethic”) that link material rewards to individual effort.

Cristopher Howard's chapter provides still a third perspective. Focusing on American public opinion, he shows that although policy elites debate the intergenerational inequities of the priority attached to social security spending, the program receives strong support across all age categories. More interesting in relation to the other two chapters is his discussion of inequalities across classes. Howard argues that the growing gap between the rich and the middle class is the primary source of recent trends toward income inequality, and that this gap is accurately reflected in demands for increases in “middle-class” social protections. Put somewhat differently, “what the people want” in this policy area is based on reasonably clear economic self-interest, rather than on religious belief.

Chapters in the last section on “coalitions” deal with very diverse topics. Peter A. Swenson traces how shifting alliances among “capital,” “labor,” and “medicine” shaped the organization of the health system in Weimar Germany. The formation of an alliance between the unions and the medical associations helped to turn capitalists against the Weimar Republic while failing to prevent the medical associations from collaborating with the new Nazi regime. Pranab Bardhan's chapter on Indian democracy contrasts interest group lobbying in Western democracies with the relative importance in India of clientelist networks, caste, and contentious politics. Mayling Burney, Ian Shapiro, and Michael J. Graetz examine efforts to repeal the estate tax in the United States. They show how advocates of repeal were able to place opponents on the defensive through the framing and interpretation of survey research data.

Divide and Deal provides a look at some important research on democratic politics, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Some explicit cross-referencing among the chapters would have been useful. The book also needed a concluding chapter to integrate the individual contributions and to relate them more explicitly to broader questions concerning the ways that the politics of distribution differs among democracies and between democracies and authoritarian regimes.