This paper makes a case for reconfiguring the analytical lens through which we compare
and explain governments’ public policy choices. The argument begins with a simple observation:
governments’ policy choices distribute costs and benefits not only across members of society, but
also over time. For the most part, students of the politics of public policy have applied a
distributive analytic to their subject. In seeking variation to explain, they have usually
distinguished governments’ policy choices from one another in terms of who gets or loses what.
Old policies are contrasted with new policies, or Country A’s with Country B’s, in light of how
they allocate their costs, how they distribute their gains, and the nature and size of each. The
intertemporal choices governments make can have as great an impact on social welfare as their
distributive decisions, yet the politics of intertemporal policy tradeoffs has attracted far less
scholarly attention than has the politics of distributive struggle. Through an examination of the
politics of welfare-state reform, I aim to demonstrate that a temporal lens of analysis can reshape
both the policy puzzles inviting our attention and the causal arguments best suited to unraveling
them.
The study of the politics of the welfare state in advanced industrialized countries has been
dominated by a distributive outlook. Most analysts of the origins of social programs have
described the process as the development of a set of rules governing the redistribution of
resources across individuals and groups. As one seminal work puts it, “…The distinguishing
mark of social policy seems to be its character as a unilateral transfer, in contrast to the bilateral
Similarly, the political analysis of recent welfare-state reforms has
been largely structured along distributive lines. Its subject, by and large, has been the extent,
nature, and causes of retrenchment.
According to this literature, as fiscal, demographic, and
1
Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 2.
2
Some scholars have also attended to recent reforms in the OECD that have expanded social protection, as
in the era of welfare-state creation, but the distributive focus remains.
Convention