Child Care and the Liberal Welfare Regime: A Review Essay

A Review Essay of Vicky Randall, The Politics of Child Daycare in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sally S. Cohen, Championing Child Care (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).     

Welfare Reform and the "Platonic Master Science": An Interview with Lawrence Mead

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches courses on public policy and American government. He is the author and editor of six books on welfare and social policy. His recent book Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin (Princeton University Press, 2004) was a co-recipient of the 2005 Louis Brownlow Book Award, which is given by the National Academy of Public Administration. In the spring of 2006, Professor Mead was interviewed by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of PAR.     

Welfare Reform: Assessing its Political, Economic, and Social Effects

Books reviewed: Rebecca M. Blank, It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty Anne Marie Cammisa, From Rhetoric to Reform?: Welfare Policy in AmericanPolitics Martha Shirk, Neil G. Bennett, and J. Lawrence Aber, Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet Robert M. Solow, Work and Welfare     

Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

This article explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although nonwhites are sanctioned at lower rates than whites overall, nonwhites are sanctioned more compared to whites in each local area. This paradox occurs because nonwhites tend to live in areas with lower sanction rates. Consistent with the literature on race and policy, we find that sanction rates increase as the nonwhite population increases until a threshold is reached where nonwhites gain political power .     

The Family Support Act of 1988: Federalism, Developmental Policy, and Welfare Reform

Revising the usual distinction between developmental and redistributivepolicies, I suggest that state and federal governments eachseek programs they believe will help them gain their developmentalgoals. But there is little consensus on the types of welfareprograms that actually do create economic development. Stateand federal participants in welfare reform consequently promotethe kind of federal arrangements that are likely to producethe policies they favor. The developmental politics of the FamilySupport Act of 1988 are shown through five main reform issues:child support; national minimum benefits; transitional benefits;welfare for families having both parents present; and education,training, and employment programs.     

Welfare Reform, Mississippi Style: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Search for Accountability

Through an examination of the implementation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in the state of Mississippi, we explore the adequacy of traditional two-actor principal-agent theory. Using this as our lens, we suggest that the choices made by Mississippi in the area of welfare reform to privatize much of the work and to add several layers to the existing principal-agent relationship substantially reduced accountability and the effectiveness of the monitoring systems. We conclude that not only is traditional principal-agent theory an insufficient tool for understanding the complex interrelationship between democratic actors in this particular case, the decisions of the state of Mississippi to complicate the principal-actor relationship through privatization also undermined the reform effort itself in ways that may have general implications for other like-minded efforts in other policy areas.
There are those who are undermining what we are trying to achieve ...
—Bud Henry, Director of Economic Assistance, Mississippi Department of Human Services     

当代西方国家行政改革:动因、热点及其启示

当代西方国家政府在危机四伏的背景下,掀起了一场以功能卸载、市场价值回归为取向的行政改革。新公共管理模式的出现试图取代传统行政模式的一些核心特点和原则。对同样面临变革的中国而言,在借鉴的同时,却需要吸收科层制的精华。     

养老保险改革的自反性与福利国家平等危机——罗桑瓦隆对福利国家正当性的透视

2020年,法国通过了《法国全民退休金改革法案》,试图整合"碎片化"的养老保险制度,但引发了激烈对抗,法国养老保险制度改革陷入自反性困境。罗桑瓦隆认为,社会保险产生于资本主义的第一次平等危机,即通过再分配减少身份特权不平等,在"无知之幕"下实现个体相似性平等。后工业化社会的到来使"无知之幕"被撕开,差异性成为平等的新内涵。法国养老保险制度改革冲突的实质是逐渐显性化的差异性特质与普遍性制度要求之间的矛盾,即福利国家遭遇的第二次平等危机。而差异性平等的实现无法再单纯依赖再分配,需要以关系平等重塑福利国家的正当性。     

Civil Rights and Social Welfare: Some Thoughts on the Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall

This article draws on T H Marshall's celebrated classification of civil, political and social rights to examine the use of the courts by individuals seeking to establish rights to particular forms or models of welfare service provision. It argues that tensions between the collective and individual aspects of social rights, the relationship of social rights to inequality, and the difficulty of quantifying (and therefore enforcing) legitimate expectations, all make the use of litigation to establish social rights intensely problematic. Drawing on the recent UK Supreme Court case of R (on the Application of McDonald) v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it goes on to suggest that it is unhelpful to think of social rights in terms of human rights: instead, we would do better to adopt Marshall's emphasis on the citizenship basis of social rights and on the social and political context within which they necessarily exist.     

The Scandinavian Welfare State: The Institutions of Growth, Governance, and Reform. Review Article

In a review of five recent works on Scandinavian politics and public policy, it is shown that the basis for talking about a Scandinavian model is unfounded. Politics and policies diverge from country to country and within each country from sector to sector as a result of institutional variation. This variation is embedded in institutional history which accounts for strong national path dependency in public policies. However, the institutional set-up at a given point in time also provides political actors with incentives for change. Two of the works reviewed take up this lead as they argue for institutional reform, in one case to protect the welfare state against political erosion, in the other case to facilitate renewed economic growth and improved living standards. The review concludes by arguing for the positive prospects for systematic comparative analysis of Scandinavian politics, providing a mixture of institutional and political similarities combined with theoretically relevant variation.     

Making Something Out of Nothing: Welfare Reform and a New Race to the Bottom

The 1996 welfare-reform law has been characterized as a significantact of devolution. For some, this devolution will free statesto become "laboratories of democracy" that develop better welfarepolicies; for others, it will provoke a debilitating "race tothe bottom" where states will reduce benefits out of fear ofbecoming "welfare magnets" that attract recipients from otherstates. This article suggests that neither "laboratories ofdemocracy" nor "race to the bottom" does justice to the complexitiesof the 1996 reforms. In the case of the former, new federalmandates limit state action and states face informal pressuresto "keep up" with one another in developing new restrictionsso that they can avoid becoming "welfare magnets." In the caseof the latter, we find limited empirical support for the existenceof welfare migration that is supposed to be provoking a "raceto the bottom." We find that there is limited welfare migrationbecause the real value of welfare benefits to recipients doesnot vary nearly as much as common portrayals suggest. Giventhese realities, welfare reform may produce a procedural raceto the bottom that turns the myth of migration into a self-fulfillingprophesy.     

国家机构改革的经验启示及法治逻辑

国家机构改革是推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化的重大举措,旨在优化机构配置,转变政府职能,破除市场在资源配置中的制约因素.结合机构改革的理论逻辑、历史逻辑、现实逻辑及国内外机构改革的特点,基本的逻辑结论是改革必须依法而行,在法治的轨道下渐进而动,这是我国历届改革积累的宝贵经验.大部门制通过对政府职能的优化配置嵌入在十余年的国家机构改革中,一定程度上提升了政府的治理效能,但在新的时代要求下依然面临诸多社会问题.要破除阻碍改革的诸多羁绊,必须制定或修改法律法规,建构成熟稳定的法制体系,紧扣新时代的法治生态,才能确保改革的法治化、科学化、民主化.     

西方“整体政府”改革：理论、实践及启示

20世纪90年代中后期,西方各国进行了以"整体政府"为内容的第二轮政府改革运动。在理论上,西方"整体政府"改革既是对新公共管理反思与批判的结果,又是一定意识形态作用的产物,还与各种协作理论密切相关;"整体政府"已成为当代西方各国政府改革的新趋向,并形成了一种区别于传统官僚制和新公共管理模式的新型政府改革模式,即"整体政府"模式。该模式具有深刻的内涵、鲜明的特征和独特的治理结构。在实践上,"整体政府"改革具有丰富的内容,既有改革模式上的共性,又有具体操作中的国别特色,并形成了一种最佳实践模式。这一最佳实践模式具有独特的文化与哲学、新的工作方式、新的责任和激励机制,以及制定政策、设计方案和提供服务的新方式。西方"整体政府"改革对我国当前行政管理体制改革的进路具有三点启示:一是建立"内联"治理结构;二是发展"外协"合作关系;三是转变政府职能,建设和谐行政文化。