American political development from citizens' perspective: Tracking federal government's presence in individual lives over time

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 110-130

  Mettler, Suzanne ^a   Milstein, Andrew ^b  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248184164     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X07000156     Document Type: Article

References (125)

1. A classic: example is Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York; Macmillan, 1993).
2. The four waves of the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, collected by Kent Jennings, Gregory Markus, Richard Niemi, and Laura Stoker, offers an example of rich data that has permitted scholars to probe change in political behavior over time. Scholars of American political development would do well to use such data, analyzing them in light of political institutional change. These data are available at: http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/04037. xml (accessed 18 Dec, 2006).
3. The two years were 1982 and 1992. Some analysis of the data from both years is presented in Suzanne Mettler, "The Transformed Welfare State and the Redistribution of Political Voice," in The New American Polity: Activist Government, the Redefinition of Citizenship, and Conservative Mobilization, ed. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
4. For example, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997);
5. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York; Basic. Books, 2000).
6. One anonymous reviewer pointed out that we could also include assessment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and Family and Medical Leave Act; however, we did not see these as meeting our criteria of affecting citizens' standard of living.
7. Readers should be aware that we are not focusing on changes in the overall size of such government expenditures, a theme that has been explored extensively elsewhere. For example, see Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
8. 1 = the CPI for the year from which X is derived.
9. As Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider have argued, policy design conveys important messages to citizens about "what government is supposed to do, which citizens are deserving or undeserving, and what sort of participation is appropriate in democratic societies" (Ingram and Schneider, "Constructing Citizenship: The Subtle Messages of Policy Design," in Public Policy for Democracy, ed. Helen Ingram and Stephen Rathgeb Smith (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), 68.
10. Suzanne Mettler, "Social Citizens of Separate Sovereignties: Governance in the New Deal Welfare State," in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 231-71.
11. Christopher Howard, "The Hidden Side of the American Welfare State," Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 403-36;
12. Paul Pierson, "When Effect Becomes Cause," World Politics 45 (1993): 595-628;
13. Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided American Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
14. Theodore J. Lowi, "Four Systems of Policy, Politics and Choice," Public Administration Review vol 32 (July/August 1972): 298-310;
15. Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory" World Politics 16 (1994): 677-715.
16. Lowi, "Four Systems of Policy," 300-302. In distinguishing between patronage and redistributive policies, we treat those which are not automatically available to all individuals in the targeted group as patronage and those which are as redistributive. As shown in Table 1, some policies, such as welfare, began as patronage in actual delivery style, but evolved into redistributive policies over time. Suzanne Mettler is grateful to Theodore Lowi for discussing these matters with her and helping her to arrive at these conclusions.
17. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1992), 110-11, 120-30.
18. On such recent expansions, see Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths About U.S. Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006);
19. and Jennifer Erkulwater, Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
20. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 204-27.
21. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 102-51.
22. Kenneth T. Kato, "Veterans' Benefits: An Overview," in The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, ed. Donald C. Bacon, Roger H. Davidson, and Morton Keller, vol. 4. (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1995), 4:2037-40;
23. Mary R. Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952).
24. Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment; The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 152-53.
25. Theda Skocpol estimates that "18 percent, of all U.S. residents aged 65 and over were pensioners in 1910, including 28.5 percent of all elderly men, along with approximately 8 percent of all women, who were included on the survivors' pension roll." The value of such benefits-worth 25 to 30 percent of average annual earnings-compared favorably to the value of benefits for elderly citizens granted by European nations at the time (Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 132, 134-35).
26. Ibid., 118-20; 143-48;
27. McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 157;
28. Dearing, Veterans in Politics.
29. Kato, "Veterans' Benefits," 2038-39.
30. We have not included benefits for veterans' survivors, though these also became quite extensive in the early twentieth century.
31. Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (New York; Cambridge University Press, 2003).
32. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republic Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 29.
33. Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Lanbs from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), chap. 10.
34. John Opic, The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 65-69;
35. Dick, Lure of the Land, 154;
36. Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 57.
37. United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970, Pt. 1, (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1975): 457;
38. United States Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture, VI, Geographic Area Series, Pt. 51, (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), 10;
39. George Thomas Kurian, ed. Datapedia of the United State, 1790-2005, (Maryland: Bernan, 2001), 221-22.
40. Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, chaps, 6-7;
41. Sanders, Roots of Reform, 391-94, chap. 9.
42. As Carpenter has demonstrated, the USDA also developed impressive scientific research capabilities and expanded its repertoire to numerous regulatory functions such as forest conservation, pure food and drugs, and meat inspection. Arguably, these functions, though profoundly important for the political economy, touched citizens' lives less directly and visibly than the programs we have mentioned (Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, chaps. 6-7).
43. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 481, chap. 7-9 passim;
44. Historical, Statistics of the Untied States, 43.
45. One possible exception, deserving of greater scrutiny, is the postal service. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, the delivery of mail was "the great event of the day" that likely exemplified federal government in action in citizens' lives (Catherine Sedgwick, "The Postoffice," Grahams's Magazine, 23 [1843]; 65,
46. qtd. in Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995J, 148). It was offered in a manner that transcended class and geographic boundaries, with free mail delivery in cities by 1863 and to far-flung rural areas by 1898, with the commencement of the Rural Free Delivery service. Richard John cautions against assuming vast inclusivily even in this domain, noting that visits to the post office reaffirmed the notion of the "citizen as free, white and male," with others marginalized (John, Spreading the News, 168).
47. Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
48. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1991).
49. 301 U.S. 1 (1937).
50. Even then, government support for labor, always weak by international standards, grew more tepid with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, followed by right-to-work laws in numerous states during the 19,50s. See Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era," in The Rise and Fall of the Neiu Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
51. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, "Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950," Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283-306. For measures of the percentage of the employed population, see U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employment Status of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population: 1940 to Date," http://stats.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1.pdf (accessed 19 Dec. 2006).
52. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey, The State of Working America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 189-96.
53. Mettler, Dividing Citizens, 199. In fact, some of the groups initially covered, especially in the clerical and service sectors, became excluded in 1949.
54. Louis Weiner, Federal Wage and Hour Law (Philadelphia; American Law Institute, 1977), 8, 62-64, 73-74.
55. Weiner, Federal Wage and Hour Law.
56. Council of Economic Advisors, Economic Report of the President, "B-45. Unemployment Insurance Programs, Selected Date, 1969-2000," http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2003/erp.hlml, (accessed Feb. 2003);
57. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Social Security Bulletin Annual Statistical Supplement and Bulletins, 1939-1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973);
58. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, Pt. 1, 354.
59. Mettler, Dividing Citizens, chap, 4;
60. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
61. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1979).
62. Deborah A. Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984).
63. Derthick, Policymaking for Social, Security.
64. Besides social insurance for the elderly, the Social Security Act of 1935 also included Old Age Assistance (OAA), a joint federal-stale, grant-in-aid, means-tested public assistance program for older individuals who failed to qualify for the contributory program. In its early years, OAA supported more than 1 percent of the population, at rates comparable to those offered by OASI. By 1950, coverage rates declined as more and more individuals qualified for the contributory program. The value of benefits grew slowly and gradually to over $350 per month in the 1960s. In 1974, policymakers replaced OAA with Supplemental Security Income, a program for the elderly poor, as well as for low-income blind and disabled individuals. Unlike OAA, SSI operates according to national standards and mandatory cost-of-living increases, features more akin to social insurance.
65. Suzanne Mettler, "States' Rights, Women's Obligations: Contemporary Welfare Reform in Historical Perspective," Women and Politics 21 (2000): 1-34.
66. R. Shep Melnick, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994);
67. Blanche D. Coll, Safety Net: Welfare and Social Security, 1929-1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
68. Comparing average AFDC monthly benefits per family to family coverage rates under OASI in Figure 9, we notice that both began with fairly similar rates of coverage-around $400 and $500 per month, respectively. By the early 1970s, however, benefits in the contributory program surpassed those given to families in the public assistance program by a two-to-one ratio: $1,600 per month compared to $850.
69. An earlier experiment with food stamps had been tried during the New Deal. On this and the origins of the program in the late 1950s and early 1960s, see Ronald E King, Budgeting Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000), chap. 3. Although begun as a means to distribute surplus farm products, the food stamps program evolved into a program to provide support for the purchase of food by allowing beneficiaries to purchase stamps at less than face value, at rates that depended upon their income. On this,
70. see Kenneth Finegold, "Agriculture and the Politics of U.S. Social Provision: Social Insurance and Food Stamps," in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 217-31.
71. For example, see Barbara Devaney, "The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children," in Social Programs That Work, ed. Jonathan Crane (New York: Russell Sage, 1998), 184-200.
72. U.S. President's Commission on Veterans' Pensions, Veterans' Benefits in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 275, 300-304. Among beneficiaries, 28 percent attended colleges and universities, 45 percent went to schools below the college level, especially trade and vocational programs, and the remainder used on-the-job or on-the-farm training.
73. Veterans who had served for ninety days qualified for one year of education at government expense, with an additional month of education for each additional month of service, up to a maximum of forty-eight months.
74. U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Final Report on Educational Assistance to Veterans: A Comparative Study of Three GI Bills (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 161.
75. The Korean and post-Korean versions limited training to a maximum of thirty-six months and permitted veterans to be trained for one-and-a-half times as long as they had been on active duty. Veterans of the Vietnam War had to have served a minimum of eighteen months to qualify for the benefits. U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Final Report on Educational Assistance to Veterans: A Comparative Study of Three GI Bills (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973).
76. Ibid.
77. Jacqueline E. King, 2000 Status Report on ttie Pell Chant Program (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 2000), 7.
78. Ibid., 33.
79. Theodore R. Marmor, The Politics of Medicare (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1970);
80. Zelizer, Taxing America, chap. 7.
81. We have not found data on the earlier years of Medicaid.
82. See fn.26 above.
83. Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995);
84. Gail L. Cramer, Clarence W. Jensen, and Douglas D. Southgate, Agricultural Economic and Agribusiness (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1997), 299;
85. John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919-1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
86. Bruce L. Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 216-19.
87. Bruce L. Gardner, "The Federal Government, in Farm Commodity Markets: Recent Reform Efforts in a Long-Term Context," Agricultural History 70 (1996): 177-95.
88. We cannot offer precise estimates because of our uncertainties about the extent to which recipient populations of particular policies overlapped with those of other policies. Our estimate is the result of first summing together the coverage rates of each of the following policies, on the assumption that recipient groups did not overlap significantly at the same moment in time: union membership, unemployment insurance, Social Security, veterans pensions and disability, Pell Grants, GI Bill, and AFDC. This results in a sum of 42 percent. Our estimate of "at least half the population" accounts for the inclusion of farm families through USDA benefits, minimum wage recipients, and beneficiaries of tax expenditures, but we lack data to offer specific measures of these in the mid-century period.
89. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line; Mettler, Dividing Citizens, chap, 9;
90. John Skrentny, Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
91. Claudia Goldin, "Egalitarianisrn and the Returns to Education During the Great Transformation of American Education," Journal of Political Economy. 107 (1999); S65-S92;
92. Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United Stales at Mid-Century," Quarterly Journal of Economics 105 (1992): 1-34;
93. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, "The Returns to Skill in the United States across the Twentieth Century," NBER Working Paper Series, no. 7126 (1999).
94. Robert D. Plotnick, Eugene Smolensky, Eirik Evenhouse, and Siobhan Reilly, "The Twentieth Century Record of Inequality and Poverty in the United States," Institute for Research on Poverty, Discussion Paper no. 1166-98 (1998), available at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/.
95. Jacob S. Hacker, "Privatizing Risk Without Privatizing the Welfare State: "The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States," American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 243-60.
96. Disabled Americans benefited similarly under Medicare: their coverage rates grew steadily, to 1.4 percent of the population. Reimbursements rates for the disabled enlarged, though not as dramatically as those for the aged population.
97. Of course, in the case of both health-related programs, escalating costs in the industry mean that increases in real terms are overstated.
98. Erkulwater, Disability Rights.
99. In his first year in office, Reagan threatened to replace 12,500 striking air traffic controllers if they did not return to work in 48 hours. The President held to his word. Subsequently, private employers routinely replaced strikers, an option that had been viewed as unethical throughout the mid-century. Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Gnat U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988), chap. 4.
100. Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement, and How You Can Fight Back (New York; Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 3
101. Ibid.
102. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
103. Thomas J. Kane, "College-Going and Inequality," in Social Inequality, ed. Kathryn M, Neckerman (New York; Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
104. See fn. 26 above.
105. Jere Cohen, Rebecca Warner, and David Segal, "Military Service and Educational Attainment in the All-Volunteer Force," Social Science Quarterly 76 (1995): 88-104.
106. On the complexity of such arrangements in comparative perspective, sec Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 138-40.
107. John F. Witte, The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75-79.
108. Howard, "Hidden Side of the American Welfare State," 422; Joseph A. Pechman, Federal Tax Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1983), 86-94.
109. Zelizer, Taxing America, chap. 9.
110. Hacker, Divided Welfare State, 39;
111. also see Howard, "Hidden Side of the American Welfare State," 417.
112. Hacker, Divided Welfare State, 39.
113. Christopher Howard, "Happy Returns: How the Working Poor Got Tax Relief," American Prospect 5 (1994).
114. A more thorough assessment would take into account the wider array of private social benefits provided to citizens through their employees. See Hacker, Divided Welfare State.
115. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 3.
116. Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design for Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 140-45.
117. Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make, Citizens: Senior Political, Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003);
118. Suzanne Mettler, "Bringing the State Back In to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the GI Bill for World War II Veterans," American Political Science Review 96 (2002);
119. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 14.
120. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 5.
121. Joe Soss, "Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action," American Political Science Review 93 (1993): 363-80.
122. John E. Hughes and M. Margaret Conway, "Public Opinion and Political Participation," in Understanding Public Opinion, ed. Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1997), 191-210.
123. See Plotnick et al., "Twentieth Century Record."
124. Congressional Budget Office, "Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1997-2000," (August 2003), available at http://www.cbo.gov; Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Abandoning the Middle: The Revealing Case of the Bush Tax Cuts," Paper delivered at the 2003 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA.
125. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage, 2006).