Essays on the politics of the American welfare state

2012-07-09The dissertation deals with key aspects pertaining to the politics of the Welfare State. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine whether, and how, policy implementation is affected by the personal characteristics of the street level welfare bureaucrats. I then turn my attention to issues surrounding the role of business in the development of progressive social legislation. Specifically, in the second part of the dissertation, I analyse the circumstances under which a segment of the big business community came to adopt a positive stance towards healthcare reform. The aforementioned questions are investigated in the context of the United States. In what follows, I provide an overview of the questions and the key findings of the dissertation. ❧ Chapter 1 examines how the personal characteristics of the street level bureaucrats affect the implementation of welfare policy. While both theory and anecdotal evidence point to the central role of low level bureaucracy in the administration of welfare programs in the U.S., no previous empirical study has examined whether, and how, the personal characteristics of the street level bureaucrats indeed affect how benefits are allocated and sanctions are imposed on welfare clients. This work attempts to fill this gap in the literature. By matching individual level data on welfare clients with county level data on welfare workers, I find that the racial composition of the welfare bureaucracy matters for clients. Specifically, I show that as the presence of whites among welfare workers grows stronger, both black and white clients face an increased likelihood of being cut off from welfare. I argue that these results, which are robust to controlling for the racial composition of the county, reflect the more conservative attitudes held by whites towards welfare and welfare recipients in general. This work provides thus, for the first time, systematic evidence that the racial characteristics of the welfare bureaucracy affect how welfare policy is implemented at the street level. ❧ Chapter 2 investigates the reasons behind big business mobilization in favor of health- care reform in the years preceding the passage of the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. I specifically examine why large unionized firms, such as the ""Big Three"" food retailers, breaking ranks with the major business organizations, spear- headed some of the most important state level reform efforts in the wake of Clinton's plan debacle. I argue that their embrace for comprehensive health reform and employer man- dates in particular reflects their failure to vastly reduce their labor costs through radically restructuring, along two-tier lines, their contracts with the unions. In light of their failure to privately solve the health cost crisis, these firms turned to government for a solution. Initially through the support for ""Fair Share"" legislation in a number of states and, later, through the formation of ad hoc business coalitions, such as the ""Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform"" in California, the ""Big Three"" signaled their openness to employer mandates, initially, and to more comprehensive solutions, eventually, along lines fundamentally similar to the federal legislation passed in 2010. This work contributes both to the understanding of the politics of healthcare reform in the United States as well as to the larger literature on the role of business in the development of progressive social legislation in capitalist societies