Review of J.C. Vrooman’s “Rules of Relief: Institutions of Social Security and their Impact”

Abstract

Rules of Relief is a comprehensive study, however, the analysis ignored the political processes involved in the creation of social security institutions investigated. For instance, for all the empirical cases in the study, who were the major institutional and individual actors? What were the modes of interaction among major actors in the creation of social security institutions? To what extent did patterns of interactions shape the design of existing institutions? What were the impact of political institutions (presidential, parliamentary, electoral politics, civil society, elected and unelected officials) as well as the role of veto players (Tsebelis 1995) in determining the outcome of social security institutions? In other word, this book prioritized the what aspects of the construction of institutions over the how dimension. Despite this omission, Vrooman’s book is a seminal contribution to the literature on institutional research and comparative welfare analysis. It is a contains a provocative analysis that will be useful for graduate students interested in social policy, institutional analysis and social security studies in general. Rules of Relief also stands to serve a great reference library for researchers interested in understanding welfare state development in the advanced industrialized countries