Abstract
This invaluable collection of original articles maps out the complex and fragmented welfare state in the US with considerable clarity and scholarship. Half of the chapters are each devoted to a specific ‘program’, such as Social Security (the social insurance pension), Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. These are the major pillars of the public face of the US welfare state, and the contributors make a good fist of providing a thorough overview with just enough data and detail. Many of the policy areas covered are not really weighty enough to be described as ‘programs’, e.g. long term care for the elderly, care and work–family policies, homeownership, but that is just a quibble, because these chapters describe well the somewhat incoherent mix of public and private effort in key areas of basic need. The point is that public law and public money (including tax reliefs and credits) are also the hidden face of the welfare state, central to supporting private activity, and thereby, often, bolstering or worsening class, race and gender inequalities even more so than the ‘public face’.
The emphasis on programmes gives a coherent organisational rationale to the material, but it means, for example, that questions of unmet or inadequately met need are rather underemphasized, e.g. homelessness, the inadequately insured. The emphasis is mostly on what the welfare state does, rather than what it fails to do. Some chapters offer more than others in analysing critical issues such as the impact on race, gender and class divisions, as well as decentralisation and accountability. To illustrate how the book works, one chapter on benefits for people with disabilities is organised in two halves. The first half is a fascinating policy history, showing how over many decades political pressures to improve benefits have been challenged by efforts to restrict them, alongside discourse about the rights and obligations of disabled people in relation to paid employment. Just a paragraph is devoted to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 1990. This was a crowning, early achievement of the disability rights movement and the first legislation of its kind in the world, which has inspired similar reforms elsewhere. More analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of ADA would have been good. But the focus has to be on the benefits programmes, so the second half of the chapter does a fine job in trying to explicate the complexities and inadequacies of funding, eligibility, administration, etc. Another chapter deals with ‘the hidden US military welfare state’, documenting the social policy regime for soldiers and veterans, which is in many respects unique in the world.
While half the book is devoted to ‘programs’, the other chapters frame the topic with seven chapters on ‘historical development’, seven chapters on ‘theories’ and three on ‘outcomes’. While the historical context is obviously important, many of the other chapters do their own policy history, and anyway the history is well served by the literature. For my money it would have been more useful to have included chapters on areas of social policy which are missing, such as: education; birth control/abortion/teenage pregnancy; sexuality; child protection; immigration. Of course, matters of penal policy, policing and the criminal justice system are customarily hived off from ‘social policy’, but the mass incarceration of African Americans and Hispanics in the wake of the War on Drugs since the 1980s is such a central social policy issue that its absence here is surely surprising.
Four of the chapters on ‘theories’ are devoted to political science topics, while economics, law and public administration perspectives do not feature much. This is possibly because ‘social policy’ is largely taught within the academic realms of political science and public policy in the US. There are, of course, chapters on ‘race and ethnicity’, and on gender, and implicitly on ‘class’ in the ‘outcomes’ chapters on poverty, inequality and citizenship. It is a shame that neither Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2009) nor The Measure of America reports (http://www.measureofamerica.org) are mentioned, both of which examine inequality indices for each of the US states, showing the very significant diversity of outcomes across the country.
So where does this handbook take us in terms of comparative analysis? Is the US the closest example of the ‘liberal’ model in practice, or is the US a prime example of ‘path dependency’ also known as ‘American exceptionalism’, or is it really convergent with most other western welfare states in moving towards a mixed economy of welfare, increasingly driven by neoliberalism? Some of the framing chapters acknowledge the comparative dimension without trying to develop it, but the answer from this book to the three questions seems to be ‘all of the above’. As befits a good handbook, this leaves one wanting more, and here the reader is blessed with extensive bibliographies attached to each chapter, with a few items singled out as ‘recommended reading’.