Administering social welfare: the Reagan record.

A preliminary appraisal of the Reagan administration's management reforms in the social service sector reveals a mixed record. A variety of gains are evident as a result of both the restructuring of whole programs and the implementation of specific management techniques. An increased reliance on the use of block grants as a means of disbursing funds to the states has generally had the effect of streamlining delivery of services. Likewise, dramatic savings have been realized due to changes in the hospital payment system under Medicare. Improved financial management has benefited the Social Security system and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On the other hand, controversial policies have been implemented with regard to Aid to Families with Dependent Children and youth employment services. Similarly, a number of important challenges, such as welfare reform, have gone unaddressed. And the administration has severely reduced research and development efforts, a policy that could have a sharply negative impact in the future. For some programs budget reductions have had the positive effect of forcing officials to concentrate available resources on high priority tasks; however, essential operations have been impaired in other cases.     

State strategies for welfare reform: The Wisconsin story

Wisconsin is commonly cited as exemplar of the capability of states for reforming welfare. Wisconsin's welfare and caseload declined 22.5 percent between 1986 and 1994. I argue that the decline resulted from restriction of eligibility and benefits, a strong state economy, and large expenditures on welfare-to-work programs encouraged by an exceptional fiscal bargain with the federal government. Continued reduction of welfare utilization by means other than denying access are jeopardized by proposed changes in federal cost-sharing, a prospective state deficit, and the growing share of the caseload accounted for by residents of Milwaukee. Wisconsin Works, the state's plan for public assistance in a post-block grant world, continues benefit reduction and eligibility restriction but expands emphasis on employment. The special circumstances enjoyed by Wisconsin are unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere.     

Holes in the safety net,leaks in the roof: Changes in Canadian welfare policy and their implications for social housing programs 1

Abstract

This article surveys recent reforms to Canadian social policy at the national level and welfare programs at the provincial level to determine how social housing policy and programming are being affected. The survey considers Canada's Social Security Review consultation process, which played out over 1994 and 1995. The article outlines various concerns raised over the Canada Health and Social Transfer, a fundamental reform to intergovernmental fiscal and policy relations announced in the 1995 federal budget and elaborated on in the 1996 budget.

The transfer of administrative responsibility for federally funded social housing to provincial and territorial governments is discussed and recent developments in welfare programs across Canada are described, noting housing elements within these programs.     

Economic voting and welfare programmes: Evidence from the American states

While scholars have hypothesised that a strong welfare state should reduce voters' incentives to base their votes on economic outcomes, evidence for this proposition remains mixed. This article tests whether differences in welfare protections across American states affect the relationship between economic performance and support for the president's party in 430 state legislative elections from 1970 to 1989. Analysing the results of over 42,000 contests in which an incumbent was running for re‐election, it finds that while unemployment insurance programmes do not affect the importance of economic performance, the electoral fortunes of presidential co‐partisans are less strongly tied to the national economy in states with generous anti‐poverty programmes. Thus by reducing vulnerability to poverty, economic safety‐nets lower the salience of the economy and provide electoral cover for politicians during economic slowdowns.     

International social security agreements: the U.S. experience

International social security agreements are advantageous both for persons who are working now and for those whose working careers are over. For current workers, the agreements eliminate the dual contributions they might otherwise be paying to the social security systems of both the United States and another country. They also favorably affect the profitability and competitive position of American companies with foreign operations by reducing their cost of doing business. For persons who have worked both in the United States and abroad, and who are now retired, disabled, or deceased, the agreements often result in the payment of benefits to which the worker or the worker's family members would not otherwise have become entitled. Credit for social security coverage the worker earned in the United States and the other country can be combined, if necessary, to meet eligibility requirements, and partial benefits can be paid by one or both countries. Because international social security agreements benefit both workers and employers, the agreements program is supported by organized labor and the international business community. Since the first agreement was signed 15 years ago, every Presidential administration has endorsed the program. In view of this support, and the fact that the agreements enhance the image of the United States as a socially progressive member of the international community, it is expected that totalization agreements will be concluded with additional countries in the future.     

Erring on the side of kindness in social welfare policy

Social welfare administrators inevitably err, and in one of two ways: either they err on the side of harshness (denying benefits to people who deserve them), or on the side of generosity (granting benefits to those who do not deserve them). The same things making errors inevitable also make inevitable a tradeoff between these two kinds of error, so at least for a large class of cases reductions in one kind of error can be accomplished only by increasing the other. Here I develop a criterion for striking the right balance. This criterion implies (contrary to all ordinary political and administrative impulses) that when times are tough and demands on welfare budgets heavy, administrators should not clamp down on applicants but should instead bias their decisions in favor of erring on the side of generosity.This paper was written during my tenure as Research Fellow in the Social Justice Project, RSSS, Australian National University. I am grateful to my colleagues there (particularly Valerie Braithwaite, Dorothy Broom, Diane Gibson and Julian LeGrand) for their advice and encouragement, and to various anonymous referees for suggesting subsequent refinements.     

When the witch doctors agree: The family support act and social science research

In 1986 the author was recruited by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to draft new federal welfare reform legislation for the 100th Congress. The result was the Family Support Act of 1988. From the beginning it was planned that the bill would reflect the best knowledge available about helping poor families make the transition from dependence on welfare to independence and work. In contrast to the experience of the 1970s, when the “Witch Doctors” of social science seemed unable to agree on appropriate policies, research made a difference for FSA. The education, training, and work requirements in the legislation were substantially influenced by the evaluations of welfare-to-work programs conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, and the conduct of MDRC in the dissemination of these results contributed significantly to the effort's political success. Whether this marks a new phase in the connection between social policy and research is uncertain.     

Political parties,globalization and labour strength: Assessing differences across welfare state programs

This article investigates how globalization and organized labour condition partisan effects on different welfare state programs. The main argument is that the conditional effect of globalization on government partisanship depends on how relevant a program is to the needs of vulnerable groups and that organized labour additionally affects this relationship. Analyzing 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2011/2014, empirical evidence largely corroborates this argument: Firstly, the expectation that partisan differences decrease with globalization in general and especially in weak labour countries in the case of programs that are less relevant for compensation holds true for old-age provision and partly for sick pay insurance. Secondly, and in accordance with theoretical expectations concerning programs that are primarily relevant for compensation, partisan differences increase with globalization, in general regarding education and only in strong labour countries regarding unemployment benefits. Therefore, while globalization constrains national politics’ room for manoeuvre in some areas, parties are still able to follow their ideologically preferred policies and respond to compensation demands in others.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Influencing retirement behavior: A key issue for social security

Recent trends toward earlier retirement threaten future supplies of labor and the financial stability of many of our public and private pension systems. One of the few federal efforts now in place to reverse this trend has been the 1977 law outlawing mandatory retirement before age 70 for most American workers. This legislation by itself will have little effect on retirement patterns, because strong financial incentives to retire remain imbedded in the system. Changes in the Social Security Act enacted this year begin to recognize these incentives but are highly controversial and at best will not begin to go into effect until 1990. To be successful, efforts of policymakers to increase work at older ages must focus on the financial incentives at the heart of retirement plans rather than on merely attempting to weaken mandatory retirement constraints.     

Quasi‐welfare,associationalism and the social division of citizenship

It is widely acknowledged that in many advanced capitalist societies, the role and structure of the welfare state has undergone substantial changes in recent decades. Arguments continue about the precise causes, and about the trajectory and impact of those changes. One particular strand in the debate has concerned the nature of the transformation of the welfare state in relation to the wider economy, and whether these changes reflect a ‘post‐Fordist’ welfare regime; while another important theme concerns the consequences of cultural and social differentiation, and the extent to which ‘postmodernism’ entails a fundamental dissolution of conventional assumptions about social policy. Radical reconstruction of the institutions, and questioning of the functions of welfare states, are resulting in more complex and heterogeneous patterns of social provision. At the same time, increased theoretical emphasis on, and popular demand for, choice, consumerism and diversity represent a significant challenge to, and perhaps the abandonment of, longstanding precepts about universalism in welfare. This article reviews some of the key themes in this debate, and supports arguments that predict that the universalist goals and principles of welfare are likely to be displaced by moves towards a ‘marketised’ system of quasi‐welfare in an atomised, anomic and fragmented society. The article addresses several issues: first, it briefly discusses some of the main implications of recent theorising about post‐Fordism and postmodernism; secondly it considers the emergence and consequences of’ quasi‐markets’ in social policy; and finally it challenges the claim that the revival of ‘associationalism in civil society offers a remedy for some of the principal (alleged) defects of the welfare state.     

Reforming the French welfare state: Solidarity,social exclusion and the three crises of citizenship

The article explores recent debates about citizenship and social provision in France. It examines the essential concepts comparable to ‘social citizenship’, as understood in British debates, and the role that they have played in the development of the French welfare state. Its conclusions are threefold. First, social provision in France is founded on the principle of solidarité, which holds that all citizens face a series of social risks (unemployment and illness) that make them dependent on one another. Second, as the traditional insurance principle (the core of the French welfare state) is founded on socio‐economic conditions (concerning the nature of social interdependence and social risk) that no longer exist, the emergence of these social ills has led to not one but three crises of citizenship: a crisis of coverage, of legitimacy and of participation. Third, while it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, recent policy reforms suggest that the difficulties faced by French welfare are encouraging moves towards the British model of tax‐based (rather than insurance‐based) financing of social provision.     

International measurement of food security: Enhancing alignment between evidence and assistance programs

A definition of food security used in developing countries by United Nations Agencies, The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other international development agencies establish four dimensions of food security: access, availability, utilization, and stability. This definition provides a framework for a multidimensional, rigorous measure of food security across developing countries and enables an analysis of the magnitude and severity of food insecurity across time and space. This framework also permits an analysis of the drivers of food insecurity that foster appropriate, cost‐effective food assistance programs. In the developed world, food security is often defined more narrowly, resulting in a less rigorous measurement of food security. Food security experts in developed countries can exploit the framework applied in the developing world to improve the measurement of food insecurity, as well as evidence‐based food assistance programs that are informed by its measurement.