Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 125-154

  Hacker, Jacob S ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43349093907     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2005.0004     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for EconomicCitizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford, 2001)
2. Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York, 2001)
3. Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass. 1998)
4. Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (New York, 2002).
5. Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York, 1994)
6. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass. 1992).
7. Edward D. Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991), xi.
8. G⊘sta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990).
9. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944).
10. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line;
11. Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994)
12. Linda Faye Williams, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America (University Park, Pa. 2003)
13. Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (1997)
14. Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, 1999).
15. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 3.
16. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago, 1999).
17. Davies and Derthick, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935.”
18. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line.
19. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
20. See, for example, Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca, 1995)
21. Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York, 1994)
22. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers;
23. Suzanne B. Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, 1998).
24. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.
25. Linda Gordon, ed. Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, 1990).
26. Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity; Mettler, Dividing Citizens; Mink, The Wages of Motherhood.
27. See Ann Shola Orloff, “Gender and the Social Rights Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993)
28. Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy G. Mazur, eds. Comparative State Feminism (Thousand Oaks, Calif. 1995).
29. Joe Soss and Suzanne Mettler, “Beyond Representation: Policy Feedback and the Political Roots of Citizenship,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2003.
30. See, in particular, Isabela Mares, The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York, 2003)
31. Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge, 1994)
32. Idem, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2003)
33. Cathie Jo Martin, Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton, 2000)
34. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets;
35. Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, 1997).
36. Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundation of Comparative Advantage (New York, 2001)
37. Torben Iversen and David Soskice, “An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 4 (2001).
38. Mares, The Politics of Social Risk; Gordon, New Deals and Dead on Arrival.
39. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets, 194.
40. On the distinction between structural and instrumental power, see Charles E. Lindblom, “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no. 2 (1982)
41. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State,” Politics and Society 30, no. 2 (2002).
42. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets, 191–220.
43. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1967)
44. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York, 1977).
45. On the limits of a historical “snapshot” rather than a “moving picture,” see Paul Pierson, Politics in Time (Princeton, 2004).
46. On the power conferred on business by America's decentralized federalism before the New Deal, see David Brian Robertson, “The Bias of American Federalism: The Limits of Welfare State Development in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Policy History 1, no. 3 (1989).
47. The argument about the decline in business power during the New Deal is elaborated in Hacker and Pierson, “Business Power and Social Policy.”
48. The term is from Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002).
49. Richard M. Titmuss, Essays on “the Welfare State,” 3d ed. (London, 1976).
50. Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1997).
51. Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (Cambridge, Mass. 2001).
52. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law See also Thomas F. Burke, Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights: The Battle over Litigation in American Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002).
53. Katz, The Price of Citizenship.
54. Gordon, Dead on Arrival;
55. Jacoby, Modern Manors;
56. Jennifer L. Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003).
57. For the more traditional narrative, see Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880-1940 (Chicago, 1970).
58. Michael K. Brown, “Bargaining for Social Rights: Unions and the Reemergence of Welfare Capitalism, 1945-1952,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 4 (1997-1998)
59. Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Ithaca, 2000)
60. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State;
61. Beth Stevens, “Labor Unions, Employee Benefits, and the Privatization of the American Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 2, no. 3 (1990).
62. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 7.
63. Christopher Howard, “Is the American Welfare State Unusually Small?” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 3 (2003): 415.
64. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 36–38.
65. 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, no. 2 (2004): 251.
66. On the obstacles to scholarly progress that conceptual disagreement creates, see Paul Pierson, “Coping with Permanent Austerity: Welfare State Restructuring in Affluent Democracies,” in New Politics of the Welfare State, ed. Paul Pierson (New York, 2001), 421.
67. George J. Stigler, The Citizen and the State (Chicago, 1975), 140.
68. This argument is elaborated in Paul Pierson, “The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 13, no. 4 (2000). To be sure, political scientists have long recognized the “law of unintended consequences.” But it is fair to say that they have shown little inclination to come up with systematic arguments about when and why we should expect unanticipated effects. Nonetheless, based on what we know about political action, it is possible to identify at least two critical factors that are likely to influence the probability of unforeseen consequences. First, unintended effects are most likely when policies are highly complex– interacting with many different dimensions of society simultaneously–for in these circumstances the limits of humans' ability to calculate multiple and interactive effects and the possibility of emergent “system effects” loom large.
69. Robert Jervis, “Complexity and the Analysis of Political and Social Life,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 4 (1997-1998). Second, unintended effects are more likely to the extent that policymakers are focused on the near-term future (to use economics lingo, their “time horizons” are short), for in these circumstances actors are likely to pay little attention to the potential longterm or interactive elements of their policies. Needless to say, social welfare policies are often characterized by the first feature, and in many cases, especially when passed to respond to pressing social needs, the second as well.
70. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2d ed. (New York, 1995)
71. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago, 1993).
72. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, D.C. 1979).
73. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, “Introduction: Understanding American Social Policies,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988), 9.
74. The logic of counterfactuals, and its relation to historical and cross-national comparison, is discussed further in Jacob S. Hacker, “Learning from Defeat? Political Analysis and the Failure of Health Care Reform in the United States,” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000).
75. See also James D. Fearon, “Couterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Sciences,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991).
76. Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, 1998)
77. Edwin Amenta, “Making the Most of a Case Study: Theories of the Welfare State and the American Experience,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 32, no. 1-2 (1991).
78. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State.
79. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers;
80. Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?;
81. Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993)
82. Idem, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (2000).
83. Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change”
84. Idem, “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes,” Studies in American Political Development 14, no. 1 (2000).
85. Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?
86. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 52–58.
87. Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, 2003).
88. R. Kent Weaver, Ending Welfare as We Know It (Washington, D.C. 2000)
89. Joe Soss, “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (1999).
90. Steven M. Teles, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (Lawrence, Kan. 1996).
91. Pierson, Politics in Time.
92. Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999)
93. Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation in the U.S. Congress (Princeton, 2001).
94. Hacker, “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State.”
95. Jacob S. Hacker, The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (Princeton, 1997)
96. Theda Skocpol, Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn against Government in U.S. Politics (New York, 1996).
97. Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security, 9.