Since the 1990s, the study of the comparative political economy of the welfare state has been among the most dynamic research areas in the discipline. Driving this dynamic is the interplay between continuity and change. Regarding the former, comparativists identify sources of continued diversity in how national economics react to, or resist, systemic shocks. Change appears in the form of the nature of these shocks. Prominent examples are the construction of the postwar neoliberal order that made mixed economies compatible with global capitalism, the oil-induced shocks of the 1970s, welfare state retrenchment in the 1980s, the globalization of production and finance in the 1990s, and the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

Who Gets What? appears as the next entry in this lineage. The central question is about no less than the resilience of democracy in places where it has survived the longest. The late Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir’s volume, however, identifies sources of variation that differ from those of its predecessors. First, capitalism’s central dividing lines are within nation-states rather than across them. Second, the bases of these divisions are not solely material but multidimensional. Third, unlike familiar schemas of “liberal” market economies and “residual” welfare states, on the one side, and “coordinated” economies and universal welfare systems, on the other, authors argue that the United States is exceptional among the rich democracies. The editors’ introductory chapter describes the forces leading to these distinctions. Rosenbluth and Weir suggest that forces of division may be too great to sustain the democratic center. Where democratic institutions have in the past been malleable enough to accommodate differences, twenty-first-century transformations have activated new cleavages requiring an unmatched degree of policy innovation to address.

The volume is organized into three arenas of social fracture: people, place, and politics. Andra Gillespie leads off the first of these with an analysis of voting for Donald Trump in 2016. Supporting claims of a multidimensional basis of precarity, she finds that while economic decline contributed to support for Trump, nostalgia and racial resentment were key. Ben Ansell and Jane Gingrich shine light on the education cleavage, and within that a growing divide within university graduates. They note that a rising share of those with tertiary education are “mismatched,” placed in precarious employment despite their university diploma. Kris-Stella Trump revisits the puzzle of why more inequality does not mean more demand for redistribution with a focus on notions of deservingness. Rounding out the first part, Kessler-Harris surveys the ebb and flow of women’s solidarity and the challenges of advancing political and economic equality.

The next trio of chapters are linked together by the role of “place.” Jonathan Rodden identifies a puzzle: If parties in majoritarian systems have incentives to moderate, then why are they more polarized than in democracies with more permissive electoral rules? The answer, says Rodden, is that multidimensionality increases the policy distance from the average voter to the average party. The tie to “place” comes as a consequence: In two-party constrained systems, urban/rural issue bundling becomes more effective than do the old single-dimensional divides for structuring political competition. The debility of material self-interest is also highlighted by Douglas Massey and Jacob Rugh. They show that, overall, race is more important than class for understanding the spatial concentrations of affluence and poverty in the United States. Margaret Weir and Desmond King shift the focus from the root causes of spatial inequality in American metropolises to reforms to reduce them.

The final set of contributions is on “politics,” broadly construed. Chapters by Carles Boix, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, and by Elizabeth Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, and Yulya Truskinovsky offer descriptions of the new insecurity landscape. Distilling themes from his Democratic Capitalism and the Crossroads (2019), Boix describes how technological change and the separation of earnings from productivity gains have contributed to electoral realignment, economic policy convergence, and antisystem behavior. Hacker and Pierson connect claims about the “Great Risk Shift”—or erosion of the private sector–based welfare state—to second dimension politics and asymmetric polarization. And Ananat et al. highlight the disrupting effects of service-sector volatility on the American labor force. The remaining pair of chapters provide original analyses and, unlike most applications in the volume, range beyond the American case. Christian Salas, Frances McCall Rosenbluth, and Ian Shapiro draw on a range of factors including, most intriguingly, divisions in left-leaning parties to understand policy outcomes and their consequences. Lastly, Kathleen Thelen and Andreas Wiedemann examine risk exposure. They show how the multifaceted bases of precarity differ for those living in the United States from those in Western Europe and Japan.

Chapter contributions to Who Gets What? deliver on themes set out in its introduction. Collectively, they demonstrate that the “new” insecurity (1) affects different income, racial, and gender groups differently, (2) is multidimensional—particularly spatial—in character, and (3) generally appears more acute in the United States. Of these three main themes, the second ranks as the most novel and, arguably, marks the greatest scholarly advance. The first point about group heterogeneity has by now already received a good deal of attention, so on this score the volume’s contribution is to relate group heterogeneity to the larger literature on comparative social policy. Point number three, on American exceptionalism, deserves a closer look. Since Andrew Shonfield’s Modern Capitalism (1965), comparativists have identified the organizational features of political economies required to compare them on a common set of criteria. By singling out the United States as qualitatively unique, Who Gets What? runs counter to this tradition. While not necessarily in error, doing so requires comparative research designs. Yet of the volume’s 12 chapters (not counting the introduction), only four include the United States in such designs (Rodden, Boix, Salas et al., and Thelen and Wiedemann; Ansell and Gingrich’s cross-national study excludes the United States). We need research designs equipped to tell us just how different the United States is, and why.

We also need work that explicitly draws out the connections among the volume’s themes of “people,” “places,” and “policies.” For instance, chapters by Massey and Rugh and by Weir and King push us to take seriously interests at the local and subnational levels. In so doing, they foreshadow what may be a growing conflict between levels of government in the United States. But do these ascendant racial and spatial divides lead to changes in policy preferences and political behavior? On the flip side, Boix and Salas et al.’s chapters show that party choice is shaped by income and industry but leave unexamined how nonmaterial sources of heterogeneity contribute to election outcomes.

Finally, heterogeneity of a different sort also deserves our attention. Contributors to Who Gets What? are diverse in perspective. For some, insecurity stems from individual identities and behaviors while others take a more institutional approach. More fundamentally, contributors hail from diverse disciplinary traditions, including economics, history, psychology, and sociology. Political scientists have much to learn from reading outside their discipline. But diversity also brings challenges. Chapters vary widely in how they are situated in previous work, theoretical setup, and implications for future research. Future work should build on the insights of this important and timely collection of essays to consider the gains from disciplinary diversity against the limits of comparability with previous entries in the study of how advanced capitalism works.