The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940.

I first took note of Ann Shola Orloff's scholarship when an essay, "Why Not Equal Protection?: Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920," she wrote with Theda Skocpol appeared in the American Sociological Review, vol. 49 (1984): 726-50. Orloff's willingness to deal with key issues in the differential evolution of social-welfare programs in Europe and America--such as the significance of gender in framing and evaluating policies, the relationship between the public and private spheres, and the "lag" in old-age security measures in this country compared to other industrializing nations--was further evident in articles published in the Journal of Policy History and other collections. Now, with the revision and expansion of her widely cited 1985 Princeton thesis, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and policy analysts have available an indispensable monograph that builds on existing theories and competing hypotheses in the field. The work bristles with judicious, original insights into relational issues of power, autonomy, and capacity among central political and social institutions that transformed social provisions for the poor, the aged, and the needy.

The Politics of Pensions offers a case-oriented, historical approach to questions of agency and causality. Unpersuaded that working-class weaknesses or the blindnesses of "liberal" ideology explained the distinctive tempo and features of U.S. social-welfare policy making, Orloff became attracted to the state-oriented approaches advanced by Theda Skocpol, Stephen Skowronek, and other political sociologists. In her dissertation and in this book, Orloff sought to combine an analysis of political-institutional factors with an examination of "so-called society-centered factors," such as demography, economic conditions, and ideas. She systematically decomposed data from census reports and public records drawn for her case studies (the influence of Charles Tilly and Charles Ragin is evident in explaining her selection criteria) to get a sense of patterns: "We need an accurate picture of the 'dependent variable,' the qualitatively varying features of social programs--eligibility requirements, financing, coverage, administrative programs, the timing of their enactment, and so on--and of the character of the whole ensemble of programs--the 'social policy regimes'--that is, the relationship of the state to markets and households, the characteristic modes of state action, and the impact of different regimes on particular social groups. We also need to take account of the full range of causal factors, and of their interactions, involved in producing these outcomes over time".

Orloff's analysis points to three"significant long-term social transformations that set the stage of the emergence of modern social provisions: (1) capitalist industrialization put workers at risk by making them dependent on a wage economy; (2) changes in the political culture justified taking constructive public action on behalf of "needy" groups; and (3) the State itself developed greater financial and administrative capacities. Conditions varied in the three countries. In Britain, the elderly's problems unified activities by politicians and labor leaders. U.S. reformers were deterred by the waste and corruption associated with Civil War pensions, which went mainly to older soldiers and their dependents. The situation in Canada fell somewhere in between: the plight of the aged neither drove apart nor brought together the interests of middle-class and working-class groups. Nonetheless, Orloff detects a fundamental convergence: "In Britain, Canada, and the United States, the initiation of modern social provision for the aged was the work of (predominantly male) cross-class coalitions of liberal political entrepreneurs, social reformers, and working-class groups, operating within and outside of legislatures. Thus, it was premised on the entry into electoral politics of the working class and their political mobilization, as well as on the ideological reorientation of liberal reform, political and intellectual elites through the development of new liberalism".

One of the strengths of The Politics of Pensions is the way that its argument incorporates the research of scholars working in different fields. Orloff generously cites findings in historical gerontology recently published by Brian Gratton, Carole Haber, Jill Quadagno, and David Thomson. I think that her treatment of intellectual currents might have been enhanced by delving more deeply into books and articles by Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist of religion who served on her dissertation committee. But this is a small quibble in a book that merits wide adoption and careful reading.

W. Andrew Achenbaum University of Michigan