Evaluating the effects of federalism

The development of American social policy appears peculiar when compared with a stylized, Eurocentric model of the welfare state. As many scholars have noted, the United States lagged behind other industrialized states in the development of social policy. The US safety net remains incomplete, most notably in the absence of universal health coverage. Benefits provided publicly elsewhere are provided privately, through employers, albeit with public regulation and subsidies. Even the language of social policy is distinctive in the US, where ‘welfare’ and ‘social security’ are used to refer to specific programmes rather than to invoke broader concepts and values.

The United States is a federal system, and it has been one longer than any of the other nations discussed in this volume. Is it federalism, then, that has prevented the development of a more extensive welfare state? For Nathan Glazer, the answer is yes: ‘Federalism’, he says, inevitably meant ‘that there were going to be far fewer national policies in the sphere of social protection in the USA’. Yet many scholars have invoked other factors to explain the limits of American social policy. These include the weakness of the labour movement; the absence of a socialist party; winner-take-all plurality elections, which inhibited the rise of new parties that might have proposed more extensive social policies than the Democrats or Republicans; the occupational and geographic mobility of the working class; the resistance of the South to policies that might disturb its paternalistic labour system; and ethnic and racial divisions among the potential beneficiaries of an American welfare state.