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Current wisdom about the American welfare state's laggard status among advanced industrial societies, by attributing it to the weakness of the Left and organized labor, poses a historical puzzle. In the 1930s, the United States experienced a dramatically progressive turn in social policy-making. New Deal Democrats, dependent on financing from capitalists, passed landmark social insurance reforms without backing from a well-organized and electorally successful labor movement like those in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Sweden, by contrast, with the world's strongest Social Democratic labor movement, did not pass important social insurance legislation until the following two decades.

Comparative analysis of the US & Swedish welfare states is performed to challenge the "equivalency premise," which accounts for differences between states' welfare systems. The ability of equivalency premise, most recently articulated by Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson (2002), to explain divergence in the development of welfare systems is challenged on three grounds, eg, macroeconomic forces typically affect the direction of capitalists' variable interests. The US & Swedish welfare systems are subsequently compared; whereas the comparison revealed that political actors during the New Deal era were strongly concerned with capitalists' interests, as exemplified by the Old Age Insurance initiative of the 1935 Social Security Act, it is demonstrated that solidarity between capitalist & labor movement interests was present during the formation of the Swedish welfare system. Attention is then directed toward identifying the historical origins of solidarism (ie, the standardization of wages during the 1910s) & documenting its development (ie, the formation of the active labor market policy) in 20th-century Sweden. Further scrutiny of the US welfare system's origins & development is conducted to highlight shortcomings with Hacker & Pierson's explanatory approach; for instance, it is claimed that Hacker & Pierson fail to acknowledge the impact that the Great Depression had upon capitalists' interest in federal-level regulation during the New Deal era. Recommendations for improving "power analysis" approaches to studying welfare system development are also provided.

Responds to Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson's criticism of the author's article, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden." Hacker & Pierson are criticized for not extending their analysis beyond the US, & their claims concerning Swenson's arguments are refuted. L. Collins Leigh