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Traditional theories of welfare state development divide into two camps: societal accounts and institutional accounts. The aim of the present article is to amend and enrich the institutional approach to US social policy by reconsidering key aspects of the genesis of the American welfare state: 1) showing that concepts such as 'policy feedback' and 'path dependence' need to be extended to encompass the effect of private social policies; and 2) taking policy paradigms and agenda setting more seriously than is the norm in institutional scholarship. The empirical analysis is divided into two parts. The first part explores the activities of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) in the decade beginning in 1910 and the genesis of Social Security in the 1930s, while the second part examines the effect of the private benefit developments on policy choices between 1935 and 1965.

Responds to Peter Swenson's article, "Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden" (2004, spring). Swenson's criticism of Hacker & Pierson's perspective on the role of business in the development of the American welfare state, particularly concerning employer influence during the formation of the 1935 Social Security Act, is disputed. Swenson is criticized for not applying business power analysis to the historical findings. 1 Figure. L. Collins Leigh

A number of scholars have highlighted the role of employers in shaping the development of the welfare state. Yet the results of this research have often been ambiguous or disputed because of insufficient attention to theoretical, conceptual, and methodological problems in the study of political influence. This article considers three of these problems in turn: the failure to distinguish and investigate multiple mechanisms of exercising influence, the misspecification of preferences, and the inference of influence from ex post correlation between actor preferences and outcomes. We demonstrate the importance of each through a reexamination of the early development of the American welfare state. The striking feature we suggest is neither business dominance nor weakness but marked variation in influence over time and across institutional settings.