Theories of the Welfare State and the Formative Years of U.S. Social Policy

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This is a study of the development of social policy in the United States. It will focus on the formative years of modern, national social policy, in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Social Security Act and related legislation and programs were enacted, and it will analyze the determinants of social policy during this period. The analyses will be based on three theoretical models that are prominent in the cross-national literature on social policy: social and economic, state-centered or institutional, and political theories. A synthesis of some political and institutional theories, the institutional politics theory, holds that institutional circumstances set boundaries to politics which constrains the effectiveness of political actors. To appraise these theoretical models, a number of comparative and quantitative strategies will be employed. Several episodes of social policy-making at the national level will be compared across the two decades. Other comparisons will examine the varying fates of social programs, votes at the national level for social spending, and state-level social policy outcomes. Among the analyses will be pooled cross-sections and time-series from 1936 through 1950. In addition, qualitative comparative analyses will be employed to test the combinational or interactional claims of the institutional politics theory. Finally, four carefully chosen cases will be examined across the entire period. This study will not only increase our substantive understanding of the social policies and programs that have endured as the legacy of this period, but it will test general theories of how social policy is developed that will also apply to current debates. This knowledge will improve the scientific basis for making the correct social policy decisions in future.