Ideas and Welfare State Reform in Western Europe

Ideas and Welfare State Reform in Western Europe
Author: P. Taylor-Gooby
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2005-08-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230286011

The new welfare settlement in Europe involves a re-direction of policy in the context of a unified market and currency system and of more stringent economic competition. Realignment of the policy assumptions and goals of the key actors is central to this process. This book reviews the main policy paradigms and analyzes the processes whereby they have changed in the most salient policy areas, and is based on recent interviews with more than two hundred and fifty senior policy actors in seven West European countries.

Poor Support

Poor Support
Author: David T. Ellwood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1988
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Examines the forms that poverty takes in American families and what can be done to remedy it.

Work Over Welfare

Work Over Welfare
Author: Ron Haskins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Here, he portrays the political battles that produced the most dramatic overhaul of the welfare system, since its creation as part of the New Deal.

The Failed Welfare Revolution

The Failed Welfare Revolution
Author: Brian Steensland
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 069117797X

Today the United States has one of the highest poverty rates among the world's rich industrial democracies. The Failed Welfare Revolution shows us that things might have turned out differently. During the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers in three presidential administrations tried to replace the nation's existing welfare system with a revolutionary program to guarantee Americans basic economic security. Surprisingly from today's vantage point, guaranteed income plans received broad bipartisan support in the 1960s. One proposal, President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, nearly passed into law in the 1970s, and President Carter advanced a similar bill a few years later. The failure of these proposals marked the federal government's last direct effort to alleviate poverty among the least advantaged and, ironically, sowed the seeds of conservative welfare reform strategies under President Reagan and beyond. This episode has largely vanished from America's collective memory. Here, Brian Steensland tells the whole story for the first time--from why such an unlikely policy idea first developed to the factors that sealed its fate. His account, based on extensive original research in presidential archives, draws on mainstream social science perspectives that emphasize the influence of powerful stakeholder groups and policymaking institutions. But Steensland also shows that some of the most potent obstacles to guaranteed income plans were cultural. Most centrally, by challenging Americans' longstanding distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the plans threatened the nation's cultural, political, and economic status quo.

Generation Unbound

Generation Unbound
Author: Isabel V. Sawhill
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0815725590

Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage. In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change "drifters" into "planners." In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts "planners," who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with "drifters," who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States. Sawhill draws on insights from the new field of behavioral economics, showing that it is possible, by changing the default, to move from a culture that accepts a high number of unplanned pregnancies to a culture in which adults only have children when they are ready to be a parent.

The New Localism

The New Localism
Author: Bruce Katz
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0815731655

The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work. In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges. Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation. This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on. New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction. In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

Postcommunist Welfare States

Postcommunist Welfare States
Author: Linda J. Cook
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801458234

In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors.

Welfare reform proposals

Welfare reform proposals
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Finance. Subcommittee on Public Assistance
Publisher:
Total Pages: 890
Release: 1978
Genre:
ISBN:

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2001-08-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309171342

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.