Abstract
Much has been written about “American exceptionalism” in social policy, but one aspect has received relatively little attention thus far: the absence of universal public social programs where entitlements to benefits and services are derived from citizenship or residency. This absence is especially striking because other liberal welfare regimes such as Canada and the United Kingdom have long developed such programs. Focusing on policy design and using Canada as a contrasting case, this article explains why there are no universal social programs in the United States, a country where the dichotomy between social assistance and social insurance dominates. The empirical analysis focuses on three policy areas: health, pensions, and family benefits. Stressing the impact of institutional factors on policy design, the article adopts a historical institutionalist approach and shows that the explanation for the absence of universal social programs varies from one policy area to the next.
Highlights
IntroductionUniversal social programming has remained a key social policy issue since the early post-war era (Marshall 1964)
In advanced industrial countries, universal social programming has remained a key social policy issue since the early post-war era (Marshall 1964)
The existence of universal programs in Canada and the UK points to what Rianne Mahon (2008) calls “varieties of liberalism,” which explains how countries belonging to the liberal welfare regime can adopt policies that depart from the main logic of that regime, depending on the policy area and the historical moment
Summary
Universal social programming has remained a key social policy issue since the early post-war era (Marshall 1964). Since the New Deal, the dichotomy between social insurance and social assistance has dominated U.S social policy (Fraser and Gordon 1992), leaving little room for tax-financed universal programs In this respect, the United States appears anomalous even within the context of the liberal welfare regime (Béland 2010). By adopting an historical and comparative approach coherent with the logic of American Political Development (Hacker 1998; Orren and Skowronek 2004), we aim to understand why the country has developed a variety of social policy programs—including some that are huge in scale—but not a large-scale universal program This contribution follows the lead of John Myles (1998) in two different ways.
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