Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden

Abstract

Current wisdom about the American welfare state's laggard status among advanced industrial societies, by attributing it to the weakness of the Left and organized labor, poses a historical puzzle. In the 1930s, the United States experienced a dramatically progressive turn in social policy-making. New Deal Democrats, dependent on financing from capitalists, passed landmark social insurance reforms without backing from a well-organized and electorally successful labor movement like those in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Sweden, by contrast, with the world's strongest Social Democratic labor movement, did not pass important social insurance legislation until the following two decades.

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