The idea for this volume stems from the observation that, somewhere between the literatures of political science and social policy, there is an unexplored territory where federalism and the welfare state meet, a no man's land without even a conceptual map to guide us. Hic sunt leones! is the warning etched on the uncharted regions of ancient maps, but for us it serves as enticement, an invitation to explore the unknown.

In some OECD federal nations almost one-third of the GDP is tied up in the welfare state, but scholars of the state and federalism typically ignore the welfare constituent of this spending and focus their attention almost entirely on non-welfare public agendas. For these political scientists, the state is always spelled with a capital S, and welfare, if mentioned at all, with lower-case w. As the majority shareholder of public expenditures at the federal level, the welfare state is not just a passive recipient of federalism's multi-tiered policy-making, but a key player in shaping those policies and, indeed, in shaping the functioning of the federal structure itself. Its size, its indispensability, and the large segment of the voting population it affects make the welfare state a force to be reckoned with. In many instances, it also provides a mechanism for coping with problems the normal federal process has no means of dealing with, as was so clearly demonstrated in the process of German reunification.