Theda Skocpol

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers

Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920*

Britain was a pioneer in launching a modern welfare state. Before World War I, it instituted workers' compensation, old age pensions, health insurance, and the world's first com...

Bringing the State Back in

Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Inde...

State Structures and the Possibilities for “Keynesian” Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States

When the Great Depression of the 1930s swept across the Western industrial democracies, it undermined classical liberal orthodoxies of public finance. Economic crisis called int...