Policy Entrepreneurs and the Origins of the Regulatory Welfare State: Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

Industrial child labor laws were the earliest manifestation of the modern regulatory welfare state. Why, despite the absence of political pressure from below, did some states (but not others) succeed in legislating working hours, minimum ages, and schooling requirements for working children in the first half of the nineteenth century? I use case studies of the politics behind the first child labor laws in Germany and France, alongside a case study of a failed child labor reform effort in Belgium, to answer this question. I show that existing structural, class-based, and institutional theories of the welfare state are insufficient to explain why child labor laws came about. Highlighting instead the previously neglected role of elite policy entrepreneurs, I argue that the success or failure of early nineteenth-century child labor laws depended on these actors' social skill, pragmatic creativity, and goal-directedness. At the same time, their actions and influence were conditioned by their field position and the architecture of the policy field. By specifying the qualities and conditions that enable policy entrepreneurs to build the alliances needed to effect policy change, this analysis lends precision to the general claim that their agency matters.

Rhetorics of Radicalism

“…2. Others have noted the affinity between the logic of abduction and both data science (Kitchin 2014;McFarland, Lewis, and Goldberg 2016) and comparativehistorical sociology (Anderson 2018), but our study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to describe an abductive computational analysis of textual data. We thank the ASR editors for noticing the applicability of abductive inference to our study.…”

“…We developed our conceptualization of radical rhetoric via a computational abductive analysis of textual data, presented in the following section. This kind of analysis parallels work using ethnographic and comparativehistorical data (Tavory and Timmermans 2014;Anderson 2018), except we rely on computational method-ologies to "defamiliarize" the object, or concept, under study.…”

“…Many of these groups' lineages can be traced back to Afghanistan, 1979Afghanistan, to 2001. For example, the Islamic State arose from al-Qaeda of Iraq, an affiliate of the original al-Qaeda, which was organized during the Jihad and has roots in Abdullah Azzams Maktab al-2 Others have noted the affinity between the logic of abduction and both data science (Kitchin 2014;McFarland et al 2016) and comparative-historical sociology (Anderson 2018). We parallel these efforts by describing an abductive computational analysis of textual data.…”

Untitled

“…The application of the approach has been used to measure and capture the visibility and resonance capacity of social movements and whether their claims are perceived legitimate in the eyes of the public and authorities. To this end, numerous prominent works of this tradition have paid attention to the media coverage of social movements, mainly deploying quantitative and comparative methods (for instance, see Ferree, 2003;Koopmans and Olzak, 2004;Giugni et al, 2005;Bail, 2012;Brown, 2013;Motta 2014;Vasi et al;Bail et al, 2017;Anderson, 2018), as other scholars focused on the role of framings (McCammon et al, 2007), emotions (Bröer and Duyvendak, 2009), and transnational diffusion of intellectual discourses (Ushiyama, 2019). At this juncture, the explicitly interactive character of the DOS approach provides the researcher to explore the dynamic interaction between the state, social movements and the public sphere.…”

Global Markets, Corporate Assurances, and the Legitimacy of State Intervention: Perceptions of Distant Labor and Environmental Problems

“…Sociologists, in contrast, have argued that markets are interpreted through historically- and situationally-defined moral lenses (Abend 2014; Zelizer 2013). Objections to child labor, prostitution, pollution, life insurance, debt, and trade in human tissues have spawned laws to restrict markets or channel their growth (Anderson 2018; Fourcade 2011; Healy and Krawiec 2017; Quinn 2008), although potential objections can be dampened by restructuring or re-framing exchange (Almeling 2007; Chan 2009; Schilke and Rossman 2018). Beyond the primordial question of commodification, perceptions of profit-seeking and inequality depend in part on the moral assumptions activated among observers (DiMaggio and Goldberg 2018; Lamont 2000).…”