Explaining America and the Welfare State: An Alternative Theory

Abstract

Although research on the welfare state is fundamentally comparative and cross-national, empirical observation of the peculiarities of the American case has structured much of the thinking on the subject. Explaining variations in welfare state policy usually begins with the identification of cross-national variations in the initiation, scope or size of national social service programs such as social security, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, national medical care and public housing. The coverage of the programs that have been established, the number of programs and the size of the benefits distributed are typically found to be smaller in the United States than in other industrialized democracies. The relative lateness of the United States' adoption of major social welfare programs, along with the low percentage of either Gross National Product or government revenue expended in social service programs, constitutes clear evidence that the welfare state is a function of more than the level of national economic development. To the extent that welfare state research devotes itself to explaining the extreme variations represented by American policy performance, its theory often derives from interpretations made of corresponding peculiarities of American popular ideology, social structure, political institutions and history. As a consequence, explaining the welfare state often depends on how one explains America.