Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for U.S. Social Policy
By E. Amenta, D. Halfmann. American Sociological Review, 2000
119 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The WPA was the most expensive and politically prominent U.S. social program of the 1930s, and the generosity and very nature of U.S. social policy in its formative years was contested through the WPA. In this article, an institutional politics theory of social policy is elaborated that incorporates the influence of both institutional conditions and political actors: Institutions mediate the influence of political actors. Specifically, it is argued that underdemocratized political systems and patronage-oriented party systems dampen the cause of generous social spending and the impact of those struggling for it. State actors, left-party regimes, and social movements spur social policy, but only under favorable institutional conditions. To appraise this theory, key Senate roll-call votes on WPA wage rates are examined, as well as state-level variations in WPA wages at the end of the 1930s. The analyses, which include multiple regression and qualitative comparative analysis, support the theory.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3308c9ff2ed63e13a58207d6344c5e0b7e16b31d
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Citations in the corpus
- The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance (2004, methodology): “Recent articles using this method, for instance, have focused on wage policies and social welfare programs (Amenta and Halfmann 2000), the emergence of the social security system (Hicks 1994a), strikebreaking and split labor markets (Brown and Boswell 1995; Brueggemann and Boswell 1998), patterns…”
- Organizational Success and Worker Dignity: Complementary or Contradictory?1 (2004, methodology): “Recent articles using QCA include studies of wage policies and social welfare programs (Amenta and Halfmann 2000), the emergence of the social security system (Hicks 1994), strikebreaking and split labor markets (Brown and Boswell 1995; Brueggemann and Boswell 1998), patterns of union growth and…”