Ideas, private institutions and American welfare state ‘exceptionalism’: the case of health and old‐age insurance, 1915–1965

Abstract

Traditional theories of welfare state development divide into two camps: societal accounts and institutional accounts. The aim of the present article is to amend and enrich the institutional approach to US social policy by reconsidering key aspects of the genesis of the American welfare state: 1) showing that concepts such as ‘policy feedback’ and ‘path dependence’ need to be extended to encompass the effect of private social policies; and 2) taking policy paradigms and agenda setting more seriously than is the norm in institutional scholarship. The empirical analysis is divided into two parts. The first part explores the activities of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) in the decade beginning in 1910 and the genesis of Social Security in the 1930s, while the second part examines the effect of the private benefit developments on policy choices between 1935 and 1965.

Industrial relations and welfare states: the different dynamics of retrenchment in Germany and the Netherlands

“…In his analysis of social-policy retrenchment in the United States, Hacker (2002) points out that the interplay between public social programmes and private, employer-based benefits (often negotiated with unions) has changed under retrenchment conditions, thereby influencing the strategies of welfare-state reformers (Béland and Hacker, 2004). Hacker (2004) differentiates between four modes of policy change and retrenchment, depending first on the institutional features of decision making (veto players) and, second, on a policy's specific characteristics (level of discretion, weak/strong support coalitions).…”

“…Therefore, it is very unlikely that Germany would be able to copy the Dutch way of welfare-state restructuring one-toone. As Béland and Hacker (2004) argue, in their analysis on health and old-age insurance in the United States, future research on welfare retrenchment should analyse how institutions of state social policy (and labour relations) structure actors' preferences in the public-private mix.…”

“…All in all, the historical reconstruction of the development of collectively negotiated benefits in the Netherlands and Germany shows that the literature on welfare retrenchment needs to be linked to literature on the effects of workplace relations on collective bargaining (Thelen, 1992;Rogers and Streeck, 1995), to research on state involvement in industrial relations (Crouch, 1993;Traxler, 1999) and to studies which analyse interdependencies between public and private social policies (EspingAndersen, 1992;1996a;Shalev, 1996;Ebbinghaus, 2000;2006;Manow, 2000;2001b;Ebbinghaus and Manow, 2001;Rein and Turner, 2001;Hacker, 2002;Swenson, 2002;Mares, 2003;Béland and Hacker, 2004).…”

Policy Design and Non-Design: Towards a Spectrum of Policy Formulation Types

“…Distinguishing between different types of layering allows us to further separate and identify different kinds of design and non-design processes from each other. 7 Layering, of course is a concept developed in the neoinstitutional sociological literature by some of its leading figures, namely Beland (2007), Beland and Hacker (2004), Hacker (2004), Stead and Meijers (2004) and Thelen (2004) to explain the pattern through which social and political institutions have evolved over long-periods of time. As applied to policy-making, "layering" connotes a process in which new elements are simply added to an existing regime often without abandoning previous ones so that polices accrete in a palimpsest-like fashion (Carter, 2012).…”

Political Mediation and American Old-Age Security Exceptionalism

“…According to the account, the act created incentives to adopt private pensions because it made contributions to fringe benefits tax-free for employers (Be´land, 2005;Be´land & Hacker, 2004;Hacker, 2002, p. 86;Macaulay, 1959;Munts, 1967;Stevens, 1988). However, preferential tax treatment for employer pensions was not a new development in the 1940s.…”