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Social Forces 82.2 (2003) 841-843



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Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and Performance. By Harold Wilensky. University of California Press, 2002. 889 pages. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $45.00.

It could be argued that modernization theory has experienced a revival of sorts in recent times. Some of today's enormously influential authors like Robert Putnam and Samuel Huntington and nonacademic authors like Fareed Zakaria share with earlier modernizationists like Smelser, Gurr, and Parsons the belief in the centrality of convergence (as opposed to historical contingency), consensus and integration (as opposed to conflict and domination), and values (as opposed to "structures") in the explanations of societal change.

Harold Wilensky's magisterial work, Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and Performance draws from some of the same intellectual inspirations as well, while also relying on an awe-inspiring amount of primary research carried out over fifty years, to offer a number of original statements and restatements about the nature of development of rich democracies. While Wilensky's insistence on viewing certain phenomena through the lenses of societal integration and consensus, or lack thereof, will likely make this a [End Page 841] difficult book for critics to dismiss, as there is little to malign outright here; unlike some other statements borne of the same intellectual background, this book neither celebrates the American way of life (or some idyllic well-ordered society), nor imposes its standards on nonindustrialized societies or devolve into civilizational diatribe. Rather, this book does what modernizationists did best: focus squarely on those societies considered modern ("rich democracies") in order to offer an analysis of their contemporary ills.

The book's first section offers a typology of modern societies, emphasizing the convergence of rich democracies around a number of common traits, such as the rise of mass education, the growth in importance of the mass media, and the increased importance of experts. Of principal importance to the rest of the book is the discussion that follows of types of political economy, and the variants of corporatist arrangements that predominate in rich democracies. For Wilensky the combination of types of bargaining arrangements (democratic corporatism, corporatism without labor, and decentralized) with the relative importance of certain types of political parties (principally, left parties and catholic parties) produces an array of five ideal types of political economies ranging from left-corporatist (which includes the Scandinavian welfare states) to least-corporatist (which includes the U.S. and Canada). These ideal types each produce specific policy processes, explored in the second part of the book, and in turn, specific kinds of "system outputs," discussed in the third part of the book.

The book's strength and subtlety in analysis rest on exploiting the productive tension between convergence theory that forms the intellectual background of the work and the distinctiveness in types of political economy (a theory of divergence, ultimately). Because the author insists on asserting the distinctive value and usefulness of each approach, however, there is an extensive review and defense of each, which lends the book something of a split personality, and different parts will appeal to different readers. While for this reader the first part of the book dedicated to convergence theory seemed less convincing and somewhat dated, the discussions on divergence in the second and third parts were engaging and original. Of particular interest was the empirical analysis of welfare policy that updates Wilensky's earlier and well-known work. The chapter on the "welfare mess" places U.S. welfare mismanagement in the context of other rich democracies, particularly the corporatist democracies that provide universal policies and prevent the host of social problems that plague the American poor. The comparative analysis shows that U.S.-style workfare arrangements and means-tested "tough" approaches to poverty and unemployment fall short of their intended goals and when examined in a comparative light only serve to make the U.S. welfare mess even more entangled and unsolvable. Wilensky also argues that it is U.S.-style means-tested benefits system that is visibly targeted to the "undeserving poor" combined with [End Page 842] "visible" taxes...

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