America’s Two Worlds of Welfare: Subnational Institutions and Social Assistance in Metropolitan America

Abstract

Studies of the "delegated state" highlight the growing role of nongovernmental organizations to fulfill public purposes. We argue that America's delegated state has taken two distinct forms: a civic-public model prominent in the North and Midwest and a very different religious-private model more evident in the South and the West. Distinctive regional legacies rooted in European immigration, religion, race, and the timing of urban growth gave rise to diverse organizational configurations for assisting the poor in different parts of the country. As a consequence, the institutions for assisting the poor are weaker in the growing regions of the South and Mountain West.

Comparative Historical Analysis

“…There were, unfortunately, no articles submitted in this time frame in the American political development tradition. Over the course of our editorship, however, we have published several articles in this vein that would have fit nicely in this section, such as Skowronek and Orren (2020), Shafer andWagner (2019), Jacobs, King, andMilkis (2019), Lieberman et al (2019), and Weir and Schirmer (2018).…”

The Racialized Pandemic: Wave One of COVID-19 and the Reproduction of Global North Inequalities

“…The health and economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis falls disproportionately on minority communities because they are disproportionately pushed into insecure and low-paid employment (which correlates with experiencing more cramped and segregated housing 9 and partial access to the social rights of citizenship). People from minority communities disproportionately occupy these vulnerable positions in the labor market and society at large in part, we argue as a consequence of enduring institutional racism and discrimination (Dawson and Francis 2015; Hall 1999; Michener 2018, 2020; Weir and Schirmer 2018; W. Williams 2020). The root causes of these inequalities include the unequal distribution of economic resources (and therefore power) but also embedded racial discrimination.…”

“…Inequalities in the labor market are reproduced in the welfare state because access to comprehensive social benefits is often based on a person’s position in the labor market (table 1). Those with low-paid, temporary, or part-time jobs are either relegated to less generous social programs, such as means-tested unemployment benefits or social assistance or have no access to income support at all (Häusermann 2012; Rueda 2015; Thelen 2019; Weir and Schirmer 2018). The same holds for racial-ethnic inequalities in the welfare state, with the additional factor that a person’s migrant status influences their social rights of citizenship (Boucher and Gest 2018; Emmenegger and Careja 2012; Hooijer and Picot 2015; Sainsbury 2012).…”

Governing the New Geography of Poverty in Metropolitan America

“…Regional nonprofits, such as Catholic Charities, have long enjoyed ties to city governments, but we know little about their connections to county governments, especially suburban county governments. The distinctive history of most suburbs and many sunbelt metros means that they have few long-established, high-capacity nonprofit organizations aimed at assisting low-income residents (Weir and Schirmer 2018).…”