The Politics of Social Investment

Abstract

Abstract Which political factors support or inhibit the development of social investment policies across different world regions? Answering this question is the goal of this volume and its simultaneously published sister volume. This theory chapter makes three contributions: a) it situates the motivation and ambition of the two-volume project in the existing knowledge and research on contemporary welfare state development; b) it develops an encompassing theoretical framework, which systematizes the relative impact of ideational, structural, and institutional factors on the interplay of political supply and demand in structuring social investment reform strategies; and c) it produces a set of concrete hypotheses to explain the politicization of social investment, the prevailing functions and goals social investment is likely to pursue in different institutional contexts, and the distributive profile social investment reforms take, depending on the coalitional dynamics that drive these reforms.