Chapter 2 revealed wide variation among industrialized countries in the relative emphases that governments place on social protection for elderly and non-elderly population groups. But the age orientation of social policies varies across countries in ways that are quite unexpected given what the scholarly literature on comparative social policy tells us about how welfare states develop. Esping-Andersen's (1990) three welfare regime types do not separate neatly into youth-oriented, elderly-oriented, and age-neutral welfare states, as we might expect. And basic country attributes such as aggregate levels of welfare spending or the size of the elderly population tell us even less about the probable age orientation of a given welfare state.

This chapter looks systematically at a variety of potential explanations for why the industrialized countries in this study display such different social policy age orientations. Scholars have called on a variety of structural, cultural, political, and institutional features of nation-states to explain divergent patterns of welfare state development. These existing theories about welfare state development were not designed explicitly to explain the age orientation of social policies. But, as we have seen, age orientation is a fundamental aspect of how welfare states redistribute resources, with consequences for labor and financial markets, family structures, fertility, and so on. So it is fair to expect that these classic explanatory paradigms should be able to account for this important aspect of what welfare states do and how they do it.