The Urban Politics of Workfare

Abstract

This article casts New York City's large, public-sector workfare program of the mid-1990s against political-economic, institutionalist, and culturalist explanations of welfare reform dynamics. It argues that the form and changes in welfare reform programs must increasingly be understood as intersecting with urban political dynamics. Synthesizing existing literatures on welfare and urban policy, the article urges explanations based on the intersection of urban labor-market and fiscal management, institutional rules, and analyses of multiscalar policy networks and urban regimes that (1) generate ideas about what constitutes policy success; (2) organize coalitions and disorganize potential opposition; and (3) import and export policy reform ideas to and from the local scale to larger scales of governance.