A01=Edwin Amenta
African Americans
Amendment
American Federation of Labor
Americans
Author_Edwin Amenta
Capitalism
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Category=JPA
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Civilian Conservation Corps
Conservative Democrat
Democracy
Economic security
Economics
Employment
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Federal Emergency Relief Administration
Fiscal policy
Funding
General Assistance
Government
Harry Hopkins
Income tax
Industrial Worker
Institution
Insurance
Keynesian economics
Labour movement
Left-wing politics
Legislation
Legislator
Minimum wage
National Government (United Kingdom)
National Labor Relations Act
Obstacle
Party system
Patronage
Payment
Payroll tax
Pension
Policy
Political agenda
Political party
Political science
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Politics
Provision (contracting)
Public policy
Reconstruction Finance Corporation
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Second New Deal
Social insurance
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Social policy
Social Security Act
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State government
Suffrage
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Theda Skocpol
Trade union
Unemployment
Unemployment benefits
United States House Committee on Ways and Means
Veto
Voting
Wage
War pension
Welfare
Welfare reform
Welfare state
What Happened
Workers' compensation
Works Progress Administration
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691050683
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Apr 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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According to conventional wisdom, American social policy has always been exceptional--exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds us here that sixty years ago the United States led the world in spending on social provision. He combines history and political theory to account for this surprising fact--and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived. The orthodox view is that American social policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly "welfare" for the unemployed and generous "social security" for the elderly. However, Amenta shows that the New Deal was in fact a bold program of relief, committed to providing jobs and income support for the unemployed. Social security was, by comparison, a policy afterthought. By the late 1930s, he shows, the U.S. pledged more of its gross national product to relief programs than did any other major industrial country. Amenta develops and uses an institutional politics theory to explain how social policy expansion was driven by northern Democrats, state-based reformers, and political outsiders.
And he shows that retrenchment in the 1940s was led by politicians from areas where beneficiaries of relief were barred from voting. He also considers why some programs were nationalized, why some states had far-reaching "little New Deals," and why Britain--otherwise so similar to the United States--adopted more generous social programs. Bold Relief will transform our understanding of the roots of American social policy and of the institutional and political dynamics that will shape its future.
Edwin Amenta is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University.
