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This book shows how responsiveness in European welfare programs is institutionalized through nationally distinct legal foundations, professional traditions, and resource networks, while revealing how resource scarcities threaten to erode these capabilities

An ongoing challenge for the administrative state is balancing the programmatic values of responsiveness and accountability. Few studies have examined these policy issues cross‐nationally for social assistance, a needs‐based form of income support where these tensions are especially significant. Based on street‐level case studies, this article demonstrates persistent diversity among welfare states in how these programmatic tradeoffs are made, contrasting a U.S. approach that emphasizes programmatic control via a bureaucratic, flat‐grant system, with German and Swedish programs in which individualized assessments of need are a core organizational task. In each European case, legal frameworks, expertise, and work arrangements have evolved in nationally specific ways to contend with the challenges frontline discretion poses to program integrity.

The way frontline workers in human service organizations implement policy is greatly influenced by how their jobs are structured within particular organizational settings. Although scholars of street-level bureaucracy have provided important insights into this relationship in specific situations, they rarely move beyond case study findings toward a more general research approach. Through cross-case analysis of fieldwork from California welfare and welfare-to-work programs, the authors inductively developed a framework for investigating how organizational setting mediates between policy goals and frontline behavior. The authors illustrate the use of this framework for welfare programs and street-level studies more generally using illustrations from their prewelfare reform study as well as from more recent postreform/Temporary Aid to Needy Families studies.