Excerpt from European Journal of Social Security, Volume 12 (2010), No. 2 (Book Review)

Rules of Relief provides an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of the origin, emergence and development of social security institutions as well as their impact on modern societies…. Theoretically, the overall goal of Rules of Relief is to demonstrate that ‘institutions matter’….. The empirical sections were designed to ascertain whether formal social security systems … diverge or display similarities in such a way that warrants a typology for their classification into a limited number of regimes. The analysis here is guided by two indicators of collective output: (a) do the regime types differ in the number of benefit recipients they generate?; and (b) is there a relationship between the empirical models of social security and the degree of poverty in the different countries?
Rules of Relief is undoubtedly state of the art research in many ways. First, it provides a cutting-edge analysis of social security development and transformation across time and space (covering 11 developed countries)… Second, Rules of Relief breaks new ground by exploring the informal dimensions of social security institutions from a theoretical and empirical standpoint … The book is a seminal contribution to the literature on institutional research and comparative welfare analysis. It 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 should also serve as a great reference library for researchers interested in understanding welfare state development in advanced industrialised countries.