Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy.

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom, American policy has always been exceptional - exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds the reader that 60 years ago the US led the world in provision. He combines historical and political theory to account for this fact - and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived. The orthodox view is that American policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly welfare for the unemployed and generous social for the elderly. However, Amenta shows that the New Deal was in fact a bold programme of relief, committed to providing jobs and income support for the unemployed. Social security was, by comparison, a policy afterthought. By the late 1930s, he shows, the US pledged more of its gross national product to relief programmes than did any other major industrial country. Amenta develops and uses an institutional politics theory to explain how policy expansion was driven by northern Democrats, state-based reformers, and political outsiders. And he shows that retrenchment in the 1940s was led by politicians from areas where beneficiaries of relief were barred from voting. He also considers why some programmes were nationalized, why some states had far-reaching little New Deals, and why Britain adopted more generous programmes.