A quarter century ago, I made the claim that the contemporary welfare state in the capitalist democracies is largely a welfare state for the elderly. But as Julia Lynch demonstrates in Age in the Welfare State, I should have turned my claim into a variable: Some welfare states are much more “biased” toward the elderly than others, and the American welfare state is one of them.

During the expansionary sixties and early seventies, the United States introduced dramatic reforms in Social Security and adopted Medicare for seniors but did very little for working-age adults and their children. The War on Poverty was mostly about civil rights, not the introduction of new social rights for working-age, working-class Americans. Archie Bunker was mostly right when he complained in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family that not much was in all this for him, at least not until he retired.

As Lynch demonstrates, the United States is not alone, an outlier perhaps but not “exceptional.” This is not the first time that scholars have attempted to measure the “age bias” of welfare states, but Lynch's effort is exemplary. The results should intrigue Americans since the United States finds itself among an unfamiliar group of comparators—Greece, Japan, and Italy. As the author carefully documents, none of the conventional typologies of welfare state differences fit readily with her measure of the elderly/nonelderly spending ratio (ENSR). The usual classification of “liberal” (Anglo-Saxon) welfare states, for example, quickly dissolves in the face of her data. The U.S. spending ratio (38.5) is not even close to that of the UK (10.2), which looks more like the Netherlands (10.2) or Norway (9.9). Instead, the United States looks more like Japan (42.3), Italy (28.9), and Greece (24.7).

Efforts to slice and dice differences among welfare states has been a major growth industry for over three decades. As Gøsta Esping-Andersen, the best-known of the “slicers and dicers,” observes in on the back cover of this volume, Lynch has refuted those of us who thought there were declining intellectual returns to such efforts. Lynch offers us new puzzles to solve and then proposes answers.

This book is actually two books, however. Book One sets up the question with a broad cross-national analysis of the major countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Lynch's effort here is exemplary, and she offers some preliminary hypotheses about what might account for these differences. Book Two offers fine-grained case studies of Italy and the Netherlands aimed at testing her theory. I like both books, though I am not entirely persuaded that Book Two provides a satisfactory answer to the puzzle raised in Book One. This is not damning with faint praise. Setting up an interesting puzzle and proposing an interesting answer is among the most important contributions a scholar can make.

A note of caution: Lynch's measure (ENSR) of “age bias” in social spending tells us little about how either the old or the young fare under different welfare state practices. It is a ratio measure and nothing more. Hence, it does not tell us about levels of spending on the old and young, or about the distributive effects of spending. Sweden, for example, has a very low ENSR value (6.5) compared to the United States (38.5) but a higher level of per capita spending on the elderly (62.5) than the United States (49.5). Canada and the United States spend about the same on the elderly, but the United States has among the highest rates of old-age poverty in the OECD, while Canada vies with Sweden for the lowest rate of old-age poverty. Lynch does not always make these points clear but this does nothing to invalidate her main puzzle: Why do welfare states vary enormously in their ratios of spending between old and young.

Chapter 2 (“Measuring the Age of Welfare”) is a careful analysis of the age bias of welfare states in the affluent democracies. This is a challenging exercise. How exactly does one measure the age distribution of health and housing policies compared to pensions and family benefits? And what about taxes? Lynch addresses all of these issues, and she has probably gone about as far as one can go with existing cross-national data. Reading this discussion, I was deeply impressed. There is more than enough here to challenge future scholars to try to do better.

Chapter 3 (“Theories and Hypotheses”) looks both backward to the data in chapter 2 and forward to the case studies. Here, we meet the familiar theoretical suspects in the welfare state literature and they are mainly rejected. We are then introduced to Lynch's “path dependent institutionalist” account. Her explanation has two main claims related to two historical junctures.

The first such juncture (before the World War II) put contemporary welfare states on two different paths: one based on “citizenship” (Scandinavia and the British Commonwealth countries) and the other based on “occupation.” The first set of countries began with means-tested programs that were gradually transformed into universal flat-rate benefits. The citizenship countries begin as welfare states for the “outsiders,” those not incorporated into mutual societies, unions or employer programs. And they subsequently extended the same logic and design to younger age groups. “Occupationally” based systems—often called “Bismarckian” in the standard literature—are just the opposite. They start out when the state takes over failing mutual society and other programs for the “insiders.”

The occupationally based countries provide the foundation for elderly oriented welfare states, but they divided into two groups following the World War II, those that began incorporating the young and those that did not. Lynch explains this second parting of the ways by pointing to differences in the nature of electoral competition. Where “programmatic” competition dominates, parties compete by promising benefits to “society at large.” In contrast, “particularistic” models of competition inevitably draw all parties into appealing to selective groups and sectors of society, regardless of party ideology. Particularistic forms of electoral competition exert a sort of “lock-in” effect that precludes the programmatic evolution of state policies in favor of the outsiders, especially the nonelderly.

As Lynch's argument evolves, “particularism” becomes equated with familiar discussions of “clientalism,” an equation that fits well with her case study of Italy. Lynch, however, does briefly make the case (pp. 64–65) that the particularism/clientalism motif also fits countries such as Greece, Japan, Belgium, Austria, Spain, and the United States where ENSR ratios are very high.

The bottom line is that the old-age bias in welfare states is largely the historical residue of welfare states that start out as occupationally based and wherever the institutions of electoral competition draws all parties into “particularistic” gamesmanship irrespective of party ideology or interest representation. Lynch clearly identifies with the historical-institutionalists: Institutions matter a lot, while class and sectoral interests and ideologies play a marginal role.

As with most abstract models, Lynch's distinction between “citizenship” and “occupational” regimes will invite quibbles. The U.S. system began with both models simultaneously: the earnings-related Old Age Security and the means-tested Old Age Assistance. How did the former (now Social Security) come to dominate the latter (now Supplemental Security Income)? Some of her occupationally based countries are very Bismarckian: They provide a wide array of distinct programs and benefits for different occupational groups (metalworkers, miners, civil servants), but not all are so complex. Second tier, earnings-related pensions from which elderly Swedes get most of their income, for example, are more similar in design to U.S. Social Security than to the Bismarckian model in Germany, France, or Italy.

Do the case studies persuade us of the larger thesis? Not quite. There are indeed some broad analogies to be drawn among Italy, the United States, and Japan. However, Lynch's Italian case study leans heavily on the distinctiveness of the Italian system of taxation, which makes the Italian state almost entirely dependent on payroll contributions to fund social benefits. It would be hard to make the same case for the United States. Without demanding full-blown case studies for all of her countries, the unity of the “two books” would be enhanced with a chapter that offered at least prima facie evidence for the generalizability and potential limits of her claims.

Two books for the price of one, however, is not a bad deal. Lynch has identified important new questions and she has furnished original and interesting answers. Age in the Welfare State is an engaging and important book, and one with which the next generation of welfare state scholars will have to contend.