Scholarship on social policy has recently emphasised the importance of gradual processes of institutional change. However, conceptual work on the identification of processes such as drift, conversion and layering has not produced clear empirical indicators that distinguish these processes from one another, posing major problems for empirical research. We argue that, in order to improve the validity of its empirical findings, scholarship on gradual change should – and can – pay more attention to issues of measurement and detection. We then contribute to this goal by clearly articulating observable indicators for several mechanisms of gradual institutional change and validating them against extant empirical work on political economy.

A belief in spontaneous progress must make us blind to the role of government in economic life.-Karl Polanyi, 1944 1Sharyn Campbell married her law school classmate when she was twentyfive. Shortly after, the couple picked up from New York and moved to Washington, DC. The year was 1970. When it came time to buy a car, Campbell filled out a loan application. The loan was approved, but she was taken aback when she noticed that the lender had issued the credit in her husband's name and not her own. Not only had Campbell applied for the loan independently, her husband had no credit history to speak of and a less compelling work history than she had. This happened again when she applied for a bank card, finding that, too, issued in her husband's name only. Already frustrated by these two experiences, the couple's biggest shock came when they decided to buy a house. Both lawyers with relatively high incomes and stable jobs in the federal government, they found a place within their price range and applied for a loan from the local VA office. The loan officer told the couple that there was only a fifty-fifty chance that Campbell's income would be counted toward the loan, because of the risk that she might become pregnant and quit her job. 2 In order to get a loan,

In this article we reassess conceptions of the welfare state with an eye towards the limits of current scholarly approaches. In particular, we propose centering the study of the welfare state around those who occupy the margins of American society. We argue that concentrating on populations at the proverbial “bottom” of standard economic and political hierarchies productively reorients research on social policy and politics by bringing crucial but often overlooked facets of the welfare state into sharper view. Specifically, the bottom-up approach we offer here entreats political scientists to re-consider where they look in their efforts to delineate the welfare state, how to examine what they find, and what kinds of questions to ask in the process. Ultimately, studying the welfare state from the bottom up suggests a host of new directions for scholars seeking to understand its politics.

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Scholarship on the U.S. public–private welfare state has pointed to the ways in which indirect, market-based channels of social policy provision often obscure the role of the government from many citizens who use these programs. This article argues that the same mechanisms that often depoliticize public–private policies for citizens who already benefit from them may actually politicize them for citizens who are unable to access those benefits. Focusing on the responses of black civil rights and veterans advocacy groups to the shortcomings of the Federal Housing Administration and the early GI Bill, it shows that public–private policies can draw advocacy groups, providers, and the state into conflicts over the terms of access. Despite facing very different challenges and bringing very different political capacities to bear, these two types of groups followed precisely the same processes of political mobilization and contestation in each case: First, they aggregated individual grievances into broader collective problems. Then, they traced those problems not to impersonal market mechanisms but to government policies and state authority. Finally, they pushed for reform across multiple venues to expand access for their members. By explicating these recurrent political dynamics, this article contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in the public–private welfare state and highlights the role of advocacy groups in helping to reshape the state's capacity to govern in a policy arena that is often characterized as dominated by third-party providers.