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The Bias of American Federalism: The Limits of Welfare-State Development in the Progressive Era

Part of: JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

David Brian Robertson
David Brian Robertson
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, St. Louis
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Welfare state programs developed later in the United States than in other nations. Today, American programs are less widely accessible, less uniform, and often less generous than programs abroad. Explanations for this relative conservatism usually focus on the lack of a socialist movement or a socialist ideological tradition in the United States. Yet during the Progressive Era, when the gap between the American and European welfare states widened significantly enough for contemporaries to acknowledge it, the forces for social reform had never been stronger in the United States. In many ways these forces resembled those in England, which at the time was laying the foundations for a model welfare state.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , July 1989 , pp. 261 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1989

References

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1986 meetings of the Western Political Science Association. The author acknowledges the generous support of the University of Missouri—St. Louis and its Center for Metropolitan Studies for portions of this research. Dennis Judd contributed enormously to this argument and three anonymous reviewers provided comments that greatly improved the paper; Alfred Diamant and Lance LeLoup made additional valuable suggestions.

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