Under what conditions do means-tested programs increase beneficiaries’ political participation? Recent scholarship has begun to shed light on this question through a series of causal studies of Med...

Pension incentives and labor supply: Evidence from the introduction of universal old-age assistance in the UK

Abstract In 1935, the United States introduced the old-age assistance (OAA) program, a means-tested program to help the elderly poor. The OAA improved retirement conditions and aimed to enable older persons to live independently. We use the transition from early elderly plans to OAA and the large differences in payments and eligibility across states to show that OAA reduced mortality by between 30 and 39 percent among those older than 65 years. This finding, based on an event study design, is robust to a range of specifications, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests, and a border-pair policy discontinuity design using county-level data. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza and nephritis, and mostly affected white citizens.

We study the labor supply implications of the Old-Age Pension Act (OPA) of 1908, which, for the first time, provided pensions to older people in the UK. Using recently released census data covering the entire population, we exploit variation at the newly created age-based eligibility threshold. Our results show a considerable and abrupt decline in labor force participation of 6.0 percentage points (13%) when older workers reach the eligibility age of 70. To mitigate the impact of population aging today, pension reforms aimed at increasing elderly labor supply, however, have to induce much larger behavioral responses than the OPA.

Abstract When do states grant social rights to noncitizens? I explore this question by examining the extension of Old Age Assistance (OAA) to noncitizens after the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. While the act contained no alienage-based restrictions, states were permitted to bar noncitizens from means-tested programs. In 1939, 31 states had alienage restrictions for OAA. By 1971, when the Supreme Court declared state-level alienage restrictions unconstitutional, only eight states still did. States with more Mexicans and Asians were slower to repeal restriction, however. Using in-depth case studies of New York, California, and Texas, I demonstrate the importance of federal and state institutional arrangements and immigrant political power for the extension of social rights to noncitizens. I also show that to secure access to OAA, immigrant advocates adapted their strategies to match the institutional and political context.

Local government and old-age support in the New Deal

We use the variation in political incentives of state governors provided by term limits to show that the variation in the level of Old Age Assistance (OAA) benefits per recipient between 1931 and 1955 was due to governors' vote seeking behavior. Governors who faced reelection were more likely to increase benefits than "lame duck" office holders. The manipulation of OAA only occurred in states with intermediate sizes of the elderly population. In addition, this manipulation increased with the degree of political competition. This paper provides evidence that the elderly and not other vulnerable groups, were the target of politically motivated transfers in accordance with the electoral incentives of state governors.

Welfare spending and mortality rates for the elderly before the Social Security era

The expansion of social security coverage enabled northern, industrial states to transfer a larger share of their Old Age Assistance (OAA) clients to the Social Security (OASDI) rolls at an earlier date than was possible in southern, agricultural states. Due to the differential rate of transferring clients, northern states could achieve a larger financial return from the establishment of Medicare while an increase in federal medical reimbursement for public assistance clients was more beneficial to southern jurisdictions. Although public opinion overwhelmingly supported the former option, partisan presidential politics and a split in the Democratic ranks enabled southern Democrats to thwart the will of the people by enacting legislation that significantly expanded federal contributions for the health care of indigent, elderly citizens. The evidence, therefore, indicates that regional differences in the share of elderly citizens receiving OASDI and OAA benefits contributed to the suppression of Medicare amendments. It is also evident that, in the absence of a presidential veto threat, southern opposition to Social Security health insurance would have been muted and Congress may gave enacted Medicare legislation in 1960 instead of 1965.

With so many studies of the New Deal, it is difficult to imagine anyone saying something new about this critical period in American politics, yet Suzanne Mettler has managed to do so. Bringing the gender biases of social policy boldly into the foreground, Mettler retells the story of the formation and implementation of New Deal social policies from a fresh perspective. Surpassing prior studies that concentrate on the gendered notions of the policymakers (such as the assumption of a male breadwinner), Mettler reveals how ostensibly gender neutral debates concerning policy design produced gendered outcomes nevertheless. In particular, Mettler demonstrates that New Deal policies consigned citizens to the governance of either national or state authorities on the basis of gender and points out the fundamental significance of this split. Whereas white male wage earners benefited from the national administration of uniform social policies, most women and minority men were indirectly excluded from these national policies and left under the jurisdiction of parochial and illiberal state governments, thereby dividing citizens. Instead of treating women as independent and rights-bearing citizens, state-administered programs treated beneficiaries as needing “supervision and protection” through a variety of invasive regulations. Incorporating women into the polity at the level of state government, Mettler contends, produced a distinctly inferior form of citizenship. To demonstrate her argument, Mettler presents a rich historical description of the enactment and implementation of Old Age Insurance (OAI), Old Age Assistance (OAA), Unemployment Insurance (UI), Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA).

The effect of old age assistance on retirement

This paper analyzes the impact of the first means-tested transfer program for the elderly on retirement behavior. In the literature on retirement a great deal of attention has been devoted to analyzing the role of Social Security since the 1960s, with mixed findings. However, Old Age Assistance (OAA), a means-tested program established in 1935, dwarfed Social Security until the 1950s and coincided with the early decline in elderly participation. In addition, OAA benefit levels were determined by the states--a key source of policy variation that is missing in the case of Social Security. I estimate the relationship between OAA benefit levels and elderly labor force participation using individual data from the 1940 and 1950 Censuses. The effect of OAA is found to be quite strong: the estimates imply that participation would barely have declined at all if benefits had not been raised during the 1940s. The estimates naturally suggest a large decline in participation due to rising generosity of Social Security in the following decade. I also offer evidence against the possible endogeneity of state benefit levels.

In this article, we develop an institutional politics theory of public social provision and examine U.S. social sp'ending programs at the end of the New Deal. This theory integrates key insights of institutional and political theories of social policy. Drawing on institutional arguments, our theory holds that the willingness or ability of prospending actors to promote social spending initiatives depends on institutional conditions, especially the extent of voting rights and the nature of political party systems. Furthermore, drawing on political arguments, the theory posits the importance of pro-spending actors, including progressive factions of political parties and organized challengers. To appraise the institutional politics theory, we analyze state-level outcomes for Old-Age Assistance pensions and Works Progress Administration wages, employing multiple regression and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). All analyses support the institutional politics theory. Scholars often consider the U.S. exceptional in public social provision and its causes. The two major theories of public social provision - political and institutional - see the U.S. as peculiar. Political theorists often characterize U.S. political parties as nonideological and unlikely to propel public social provision. The same is true for the American labor movement, which is smaller and more divided than its Western European counterparts. For these reasons, political arguments explaining gains in U.S. public social spending often focus on challengers employing innovative forms of claims making. Institutional or statecentered theories portray U.S. state and political institutions as hindrances to * A previous version of this paper was presented at the 1993 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston. Parts of this article were presented at the 1992 annual meeting of theAmerican SociologicalAssociation, Pittsburgh. Forhelpful comments on a previous draft of this paper, we thank Steven Barkan, Nancy X Cauthen, Jeff Goodwin, Brian Gran, James M.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of stricter eligibility enforcement on the flow of applications of the Old Age Assistance (OAA) Program in New Jersey. Most of the previous research in the welfare area has focused entirely on explaining measures of the stock demand for public assistance. Higher claim denial rates may affect the stock demand by deterring those potential recipients with less legitimate claims. However, there is also a strictly mechanical relationship such that a claim period t or in state i reduces, pari passu, the stock demand in period t or in state i below the level that would have prevailed in the absence of the denial. Thus, if the objective is to isolate a deterence effect, it seems more appropriate to examine the impact of previous recent denial rates on the flow of new applications for public assistance. A time series of monthly applications for OAA in New Jersey are related to lagged values of the denial rate of such applications, cyclical activity, seasonal factors and trend. The results suggest that stricter enforcement of eligibility rules does deter future claims.

ROOSEVELT was right. It has been 50 years since the passage of the Act of 1935, and Roosevelt's strategy bolstered both his program and the reputation of his party. Although Social Security was originally applied to the entire act by Congress, the term subsequently became synonymous for only the old-age and survivors' insurance program (now part of the old-age, survivors', and disability insurance program, OASDI). The establishment of marked the late and modest expansion, compared with other affluent countries, of the American welfare state (see Wilensky, 1975). Since then and many other social welfare policies have had substantial support, and there is some evidence that the benefits from these programs have become-or have been perceived as-rights of citizenship (cf. Zald, 1985; Erskine, 1975a, 1975b). It is particularly striking that during the 1935-1985 period as a whole, public polls failed to track trends in opinion toward old-age assistance and Security. From 1950 to the mid-1970s we found only an average of about one survey question per year-and all of these questions were worded differently. There were a fair number of questions asked in the 1930s and 1940s, revealing very high levels of support (Schiltz, 1970), and there have been great flurries of interest in the late 1970s and 1980s as the financial problems of the federal government and system increased and as senior citizens and their

The future status of the welfare system is one of the most important issues in current U.S. federal-state government relations. Effective January 1, 1974, the federal government discontinued three of the public assistance programs, Old Age Assistance (OAA), Aid to the Blind (AB), and Aid for the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD), replacing them with a new Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Federal payments under SSI far exceed the federal contribution under the old programs. Despite these reforms, the underlying premise of this paper is that states' experiences with the welfare system over the past two decades remain highly relevant in determining their responses to the new regime. This is so primarily because welfare will remain an important state decision. In the first place, the two largest welfare programs, Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medicaid, continue as a joint federal-state program operating under the old federal aid formulae, in which states determine recipient payment levels. Secondly, the federal SSI payments are still less than the combined federal-state-local payments for the old public assistance programs in many states. These states will almost certainly continue to provide welfare assistance from their own budgets. For them the SSI program merely represents a change in the federal aid formulae and/or the amount of federal support. Finally, states previously paying recipents less than the current SSI levels may well choose to supplement the federal payments since they were forced to contribute under the old formulae. Therefore in most state t the overall level of welfare support will remain as important a decision as it has been in the past, even for SSI recipients. In attempting to answer some of the policy issues in the welfare area, we estimated a full model of state government behavior using an extensive data base covering the sixteenyear period, fiscal years 1954 through 1969.1 The coefficient estimates shed light on the following questions: a) During the sample period, how did states react to changes in the federal welfare formulae, which have always contained both price and income incentives?2 The relevance of this question for the AFDC and Medicaid programs has already been noted. In addition, knowledge of the states' reactions to the previous federal welfare formulae will

KAREN M. GREEN, R.N. Area Administrator Glenwood (Iowa) State Hospital-School M ANY PEOPLE over 60 years of age in southwest Iowa who previously felt lonely, forgotten, and unwanted have re-entered the mainstream of society through our foster grandparent program. It has given purpose to their lives, put money in their pockets, and provided retarded children with the love they need. Mrs. Story’s experience is typical. In January 1967, at 76, she believed her future held only arthritic pains and a meager existence on Old-Age Assistance. She had little to talk about with her husband, an invalid who depended on her physically and financially. In ‘sfarch she read an advertisement in the local paper about the foster grandparent program at our institution. She was skeptical, but willing to try anything that might make her days more interesting. She joined the program, and after two weeks of inservice training she was a certified foster grandparent. When she met tile two children assigned to her, she found they could neither walk nor talk, nor were they toilet-trained. She began to spend two hours a day with each of them five days a week. She fed them, played with them, pampered them, and loved them. The children learned to recognize her voice and the touch of her hand and showed definite signs of improvement. Mrs. Story looked forward to each day, knowing that the children needed her. The money she earned, at $1.40 an hour, helped stretch her budget. She felt better physically, and her marriage was happier-sile had something to talk about with her husband.

The Negro Recipient of Old-Age Assistance: Results of Discrimination

<h3>Kerr-Mills Increase.</h3> —The HEW Department said improvements in public welfare programs during 1962 brought financial aid to more of the nation's unemployed and their children, increased payments to needy disabled and old people, and provided medical assistance for the aged (Kerr-Mills) in 10 additional states. There were 50% more recipients of medical assistance for the aged in December, 1962 than a year earlier and the number of states administering the program had increased from 19 to 28. Three-fourths of the states reported increases in recipients of aid to the permanently and totally disabled. One-fourth of the 10% national increase was concentrated in California. The old-age assistance program declined almost 2% nationally, with decreases reported by nearly 9 out of 10 states. The number receiving aid to the blind decreased nearly 4% from a year earlier. Total expenditures for 1962 amounted to $4.1 billion in federal, state, and local funds. This

the grants for transportation and communication (mostly for highway construction), and for employment security (administration of unemployment compensation and the unemployment service), grew less rapidly than the total.1 Distribution of grants among the states altered in the decade, and the alteration was markedly in favor of the poorer states. Of the nineteen states which received an above-average increase in per capita federal grants 1941-52, all but two (Rhode Island and Missouri) were below average in per capita income 1949-51. The shift occurred because the greatest expansion was in welfare grants which naturally go to the poorer states and because the distribution formulas were altered so as to favor the poorer states. For example, grants for oldage assistance in 1941 could not exceed half a maximum payment of $40 monthly per recipient, whereas in 1951 the federal government