Age for Leisure? Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on U.S. Old-Age Policy

Abstract

S cholars have increasingly turned their attention to the consequences of social movements (cf. Zald 1988 andAmenta andCaren 2004). Much of this work has focused on the external consequences of movements, especially those relating to states and struggles over legislation. Despite this work, one reviewer (Giugni 2004) recently argued that our knowledge accumulation on the subject has thus far been minor. Others (McAdam 1999;Zald 2000) argue that the political process and resource mobilization models do not help to explain the consequences of these movements. Other reviewers (Burstein and Linton 2002) claim that quantitative analyses in this area have frequently been misspecified and that when public opinion is taken into account challengers are found to have little direct influence on state-related outcomes.In this paper, we seek to contribute to this debate by elaborating and appraising a political mediation theory of social movement consequences (Piven and This article elaborates a political mediation theory of the impact of social movements on states and policy, positing that the influence of mobilization and specific strategies of collective action depends on specified political contexts and the type of influence sought. Examining the influence of the U.S. old-age pension movement, which involved millions of people, this article appraises the mediation model using state-level data from the 1930s and 1940s on Old Age Assistance-the main support for the aged at the time-and a Senate vote for generous senior citizens' pensions in 1939. Our models control for other potential influences, notably public opinion, which is often ignored in empirical studies and sometimes claimed to be responsible for causal influence mistakenly attributed to challengers. We employ pooled cross-sectional and time series analyses and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (FSQCA), which is especially suited to appraising the combinational expectations of the political mediation model. Both sets of analyses show that the pension movement was directly influential on the outcomes and provide support for the political mediation arguments.

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“…Though unexpected, this finding reflects theoretical developments within the social movements literature. After a certain point, entrenched allies provide sufficient access to preclude political activity (Soule and Zylan 1997;Jenkins, Jacobs and Agnone 2003;Amenta, Olasky and Caren 2005). Conversely, the type of legislative support supplied through favorable bill introductions is held as providing increased access without lessening the need for participation altogether (McAdam 1999;Cress and Snow 2000).…”

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