The first major reassessment of ancient Chinese religion to appear in recent years, this book presents the religious mentality of the period through personal and daily experiences.

In this influential work, Richard A. Easterlin shows how the size of a generation—the number of persons born in a particular year—directly and indirectly affects the personal welfare of its members, the make-up and breakdown of the family, and the general well being of the economy. "[Easterlin] has made clear, I think unambiguously, that the baby-boom generation is economically underprivileged merely because of its size. And in showing this, he demonstrates that population size can be as restrictive as a factor as sex, race, or class on equality of opportunity in the U.S."—Jeffrey Madrick, Business Week

This book is the first major reassessment of ancient Chinese religion to appear in recent years. It provides a historical investigation of broadly shared religious beliefs and goals in ancient China from the earliest period to the end of the Han Dynasty. The author makes use of recently acquired archeological data, traditional texts, and modern scholarly work from China, Japan, and the West. The overall concern of this book is to try to reach the religious mentality of the ancient Chinese in the context of personal and daily experiences. Poo deals with such problems as the definition of religion, the popular/elite controversy in methodology, and the use of "elite" documents in the study of ordinary life.

People who participate in debates about the causes and cures of poverty often speak from religious conviction. But those convictions are rarely made explicit or debated on their own terms. Rarely is the influence of personal religious commitment on policy decisions examined. Two of the nation's foremost scholars and policy advocates break the mold in this lively volume, the first to be published in the new Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life. The authors bring their faith traditions, policy experience, academic expertise, and political commitments together in this moving, pointed, and informed discussion of poverty, one of our most vexing public issues. Mary Jo Bane writes of her experiences running social service agencies, work that has been informed by "Catholic social teaching, and a Catholic sensibility that is shaped every day by prayer and worship." Policy analysis, she writes, is often "indeterminate" and "inconclusive." It requires grappling with "competing values that must be balanced." It demands judgment calls, and Bane's Catholic sensibility informs the calls she makes. Drawing from various Christian traditions, Lawrence Mead's essay discusses the role of nurturing Christian virtues and personal responsibility as a means of transforming a "defeatist culture" and combating poverty. Quoting Shelley, Mead describes theologians as the "unacknowledged legislators of mankind" and argues that even nonbelievers can look to the Christian tradition as "the crucible that formed the moral values of modern politics." Bane emphasizes the social justice claims of her tradition, and Mead challenges the view of many who see economic poverty as a biblical priority that deserves "preference ahead of other social concerns." But both assert that an engagement with religious traditions is indispensable to an honest and searching debate about poverty, policy choices, and the public purposes of religion.

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or "stability?" In Welfare for Autocrats, Jennifer Pan shows that China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. Pan traces how China's approach to enforcing order transformed at the turn of the 21st century and identifies a phenomenon she calls seepage whereby one policy--in this case, quelling dissent--alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government. Using novel datasets and a variety of methodologies, Welfare for Autocrats challenges the view that concessions and repression are distinct strategies and departs from the assumption that all tools of repression were originally designed as such. Pan reaches the startling conclusion that China's preoccupation with order not only comes at great human cost but in the case of Dibao may well backfire.

This study investigates the extent to which personal welfare state experiences affect general political orientations and attitudes. What are the political effects when a person is discontent with some aspect of, say, the particular health services or the public kindergartens that she has been in personal contact with? Do they lose faith in the welfare state or in leftist ideas about large-scale state intervention in society? Do they take their negative experiences as a sign that the political system and its politicians are not functioning satisfactorily? Will their inclination to support the governing party drop? And if so, how strong are the political effects of personal welfare state experiences compared to those of other, more well-known, explanatory factors? Addressing these and other questions, this study develops a theoretical framework that incorporates insights from a multitude of research traditions, including research on the welfare state, voting behaviour, social psychology, rational choice theory, political psychology, and institutional theory. The framework is tested empirically using Swedish primary survey data collected under the auspices of the 1999 West Sweden SOM Survey, and the 1999 Swedish European Parliament Election Study.

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.