Title: Rules of relief
Subtitle: Institutions of social security, and their impact
Description: 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.
Subjects: sociology, social policy, social security, institutional change, welfare regime, benefit dependency, poverty, Public welfare, Wohlfahrtsstaat, Armut, Sozialhilfe, Institutionalisierung, Sociale zekerheid, Vergelijkend onderzoek, Institutionalisme
Places: The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, USA, Canada, UK, Australia
People: Esping-Andersen
Time periods: 1980-2010