Prerequisites Versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption

Prerequisites Versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption* DAVID COLLIER Indiana University RICHARD E. MESSICK George Washington University Social security is one of the most important means by which modern nations protect the wel- fare of their citizens. Through programs that deal with the hardships of workers' injury, illness, old age, unemployment, and low income, social se- curity attempts to set a minimum standard of living for the sectors of society covered by the programs. In countries with fully developed pro- grams, social security now protects nearly all members of society. Given the importance of social security, it is hardly surprising that scholars have shown con- siderable interest in analyzing its evolution. Among the many aspects of social security de- velopment, the timing of the first adoption of social security merits particular attention. The circumstances of the first appearance of any policy are inherently interesting, and the first ap- pearance of social security is particularly impor- tant because it has represented in many nations a major break with the antiwelfare doctrine of tra- ditional liberalism. The timing of first adoption has received con- siderable attention in comparative research on social security.' However, this research has gen- * This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1973 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. The research was sup- ported by grants from the Cross-Cultural Fellowship Program and the Honors Division of Indiana Uni- versity and by a Ford Foundation Political Science Faculty Research Fellowship. John V. Gillespie played a major role in stimulating our concern with the place of diffusion in cross-national research, and Ruth B. Collier provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article. We are obviously solely re- sponsible for the final form which the article has taken. 1 See Margaret Gordon, The Economics of Welfare Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Phillips Cutright, Political Structure, Eco- nomic Development and National Social Security Programs, The American Journal of Sociology, 70 (March, 1965), 537-550; Phillips Cutright, Income Redistribution: A Cross-National Analysis, Social Forces, 46 (December, 1967), 180-190; Henry Aaron, Social Securitv: International Comparisons, in Otto Eckstein, ed., Studies in the Economics of Income Maintenance (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Insti- tution, 1967); Frederick Pryor, Public Expenditures in Communist and Capitalist Nations (Homewood, Ill.: erally used the timing of adoption to explain other aspects of the social security experience of nations, and not as an outcome that is itself to be explained.2 The present research is concerned with explaining the timing of the first adoption of so- cial security among the 59 countries which had formal political autonomy with regard to domes- tic policy at the time of first adoption (see Ap- pendix). The analysis focuses on two of the most im- portant explanations of social security develop- ment: the prerequisites explanation, which em- phasizes causes of social security development within nations, most commonly the level of social and economic modernization; and diffusion, which focuses on the imitation of social security programs among nations. These alternative theo- retical approaches have received very unequal at- tention in political research. The prerequisites approach has been widely used, particularly in the area of comparative politics.4 By contrast, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1968); and Koji Taira and Peter Kilby, Differences in Social Se- curity Development in Selected Countries, Inter- national Social Security Review, 22 (1969), 139-153. 2 In quantitative research, the only exception of which we are aware is a two and a half page analysis in Appendix E-12 in Pryor, Public Expenditures. His- torical studies such as Gaston V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America and Russia (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971) have also attempted to explain timing of adoption. 3 This expression is used loosely here to refer to what Marion Levy has labeled functional and struc- tural prerequisites. In using the expression prerequi- sites, we are following his distinction between the prerequisites for the appearance of a given phenome- non and the requisites for its continued existence. See Marion J. Levy, Jr., The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 62-63 and 71-72. 4Examples of cross-national studies that examine various forms of the prerequisites and requisites hypotheses (see footnote 3) with regard to demo- cratic political outcomes are S. M. Lipset, Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Develop- ment and Political Legitimacy, American Political Science Review, 53 (March, 1959), 69-105; James S. Coleman, Conclusion: The Political Systems of the Developing Areas, in Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1676534