부산대학교 도서관

Debt has become an essential part of many people's daily lives. This article develops a new comparative political economy perspective on the relationship between welfare states and household borrowing. I argue that the ways in which welfare states distribute benefits, and credit regimes provide access to credit, affect how individuals address social risks and, as a consequence, shape patterns of indebtedness. Permissive credit regimes substitute for social policies in limited welfare states, pushing economically disadvantaged groups into debt. Alternatively, credit markets complement social policies in the provision of financial liquidity in comprehensive welfare states, protecting vulnerable groups through government benefits while allowing less-protected affluent groups to borrow money. In restrictive regimes, people instead rely on savings, expenditure cuts, and family support. I test these arguments using an original measure of credit regime permissiveness, cross-national survey data, and full-population administrative records from Denmark and panel data from the United States. Biographical information: Andreas Wiedemann is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 413 Robertson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540 (awiedemann@princeton.edu). Article Note: For very helpful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Ben Ansell, Elissa Berwick, Aslı Cansunar, Charlotte Cavaillé, Pepper Culpepper, Michael Donnelly, James Dunham, Jane Gingrich, Peter Hall, Danny Hidalgo, Christian Ibsen, Torben Iversen, Marika Landau-Wells, Mark Manger, Jonas Markgraf, Darius Ornston, Alexander Reisenbichler, Tesalia Rizzo, Leah Rosenzweig, David Rueda, Thomas Sattler, David Singer, Kathleen Thelen, Tim Vlandas, and seminar participants at MIT, Nuffield College, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Toronto, and the 2019 Annual Meeting of the European Political Science Association, and the editors and anonymous reviewers. Yutian An and Owen Engel provided excellent research assistance. This research was generously funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. CAPTION(S): Appendix A: Data Sources and Variable Construction for U.S. and Danish Administrative Data Appendix B: Credit Regimes: Methodological Background and Data Sources Appendix C: Full Regression Results Byline: Andreas Wiedemann