Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden

Book excerpt: Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden was the winner of the 1974 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs. “[Heclo] painstakingly analyses the evolution of income maintenance policies over the past 100 years in Britain and Sweden in an effort to explain why these policies evolved as they did. He thus poses a question of fundamental importance to both policy and political science and he produces an answer which is neither obvious nor dramatic but which is original, discriminating, and persuasive. His book is an unusually judicious combination of political theory, historical research, comparative method, and policy analysis. And not to be overlooked is the fact that all this is expressed in a crisp, literate prose style, of the sort which has unfortunately become, somewhat rare in our profession. Modern Social Politics represents a major contribution to the discipline on not one but several fronts and stands as a model of how political scientists can tease out of history answers to the question: why?” Samuel P. Huntington, Chairman of the Award Committee