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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.

In recent years, scholars have made major progress in understanding the dynamics of "policy drift"—the transformation of a policy's outcomes due to the failure to update its rules or structures to reflect changing circumstances. Drift is a ubiquitous mode of policy change in America's gridlock-prone polity, and its causes are now well understood. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the political consequences of drift—to the ways in which drift, like the adoption of new policies, may generate its own feedback effects. In this article, we seek to fill this gap. We first outline a set of theoretical expectations about how drift should affect downstream politics. We then examine these dynamics in the context of four policy domains: labor law, health care, welfare, and disability insurance. In each, drift is revealed to be both mobilizing and constraining: While it increases demands for policy innovation, group adaptation, and new group formation, it also delimits the range of possible paths forward. These reactions to drift, in turn, generate new problems, cleavages, and interest alignments that alter subsequent political trajectories. Whether formal policy revision or further stalemate results, these processes reveal key mechanisms through which American politics and policy develop.

Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial economic shocks. Citizens' policy attitudes in turn appear highly responsive to economic worries, as well as to the experience of economic shocks—with worries and shocks creating greater support for government policies that buffer the relevant economic risk. Attitudes seem most affected by temporally proximate shocks, shocks befalling households that have weak private safety nets, and shocks occurring within the domain most relevant to the policy in question, though attitudes are also (more weakly) correlated with shocks in other domains. The magnitude of these associations rivals partisanship and ideology and almost always exceeds that for conventional measures of socio-economic status. Given the long-term increase in economic insecurity and current sluggish recovery, understanding how insecurity shapes citizens' policy attitudes and political behavior should be a major concern of political science.

Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations—vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state—reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged and insecure represent two distinct groups, popular support is broader and opinion less polarized. We test these predictions both across nations within a single policy area (unemployment insurance) and across policy domains within a single polity (the United States, using a new survey). Results are consistent with our predictions and are robust to myriad controls and specifications. When disadvantage and insecurity are more correlated, the welfare state is more contested.

Enthält Rezension von: Hacker, Jacob S.; Pierson, Paul: Winner-take-all politics : how Washington made the rich richer - and turned its back on the middle class. - New York/N.Y. : Simon & Schuster, 2010