Guns and Butter? Regime Competition and the Welfare State during the Cold War

Research Article

WORLD POLITICS

VOL 63-02 (2011)

Guns and Butter? Regime Competition and the Welfare State during the Cold War

Herbert Obinger^a1 and Carina Schmitt^a2*

^a1 University of Bremen's Center for Social Policy Research, Email: hobinger@zes.uni-bremen.de

^a2 University of Bremen, Email: carina.schmitt@sfb579.uni-bremen.de

Abstract

Scholars from a number of disciplines have argued that the massive expansion of the welfare state in the postwar period was at least in some part a byproduct of the cold war and the associated political competition between two rival regime blocs. However, the question of whether regime competition fuelled welfare-state growth has never been subject to systematic examination. Applying spatial econometrics, this article offers the first empirical test of this argument. The authors' findings support the notion that regime competition stimulated the expansion of the welfare state on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the postwar period

Herbert Obinger is a professor of comparative public and social policy at the University of Bremen's Center for Social Policy Research. He is coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (2010) and coauthor ofTransformations of the Welfare State: Small States, Big Lessons (2010).

Carina Schmitt is research fellow in political science at the Collaborative Research Center Transformations of the State (TranState) at the University of Bremen. Her current research focuses on comparative public policy and quantitative comparative methods. Schmitt has published on civic engagement in Latin America and on convergence of oecd welfare states.