An African American Welfare State

Pimpare, Stephen

doi:10.1080/07393140701523643

Cited by 2 publications

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“…3 To be clear, we approach the “welfare state” as an idea that does not directly map onto the world as it is but nonetheless provides a language and analytical frame for understanding how (and to what effect) political institutions and practices function. At the same time, we do not assume the extent to which the institutions and practices we have in mind to study are actually protecting or ensuring people’s “welfare.” Indeed, important and varied research suggests less salutary functions of the state including regulation, social control, and oppression (Goldsmith and Blakely 2013; Katz, 2001; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Soss and Weaver 2017; Ochs 2015; Piven and Cloward 1971), or challenges the assumption that the “welfare state” is, in reality, a recognizable and coherent system of social provision or even a single coherent entity (Pimpare 2007a). These perspectives on the state are crucial, particularly for the marginalized populations we emphasize in this article.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Second, we use “bottom” to refer to those for whom the functions of the welfare state are most crucial for day to day survival and thriving. Most obviously this includes people who are marginal in various respects—those living in poverty, disproportionately beholden to economic shifts, and experiencing otherwise precarious lives (Pimpare 2007a, b). Expanding even further, the “bottom” also comprises people who have secured “working class” or “middle class” status, but whose continued stability and economic positioning relies substantially upon the choices made by elites who determine the reach and generosity of welfare state provisions (Michener 2017).…”

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From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship

Michener

SoRelle

Thurston³

2020

Perspect. polit.

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In this article we reassess conceptions of the welfare state with an eye towards the limits of current scholarly approaches. In particular, we propose centering the study of the welfare state around those who occupy the margins of American society. We argue that concentrating on populations at the proverbial “bottom” of standard economic and political hierarchies productively reorients research on social policy and politics by bringing crucial but often overlooked facets of the welfare state into sharper view. Specifically, the bottom-up approach we offer here entreats political scientists to re-consider where they look in their efforts to delineate the welfare state, how to examine what they find, and what kinds of questions to ask in the process. Ultimately, studying the welfare state from the bottom up suggests a host of new directions for scholars seeking to understand its politics.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship

Michener

SoRelle

Thurston³

2020

Perspect. polit.

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Racial Orders, Congress, and the Agricultural Welfare State, 1865–1940

Johnson

2011

Stud. Am. Pol. Dev.

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One of the key questions posed by analysts of modern, twentieth-century agricultural politics is, "How and when did agrarian democracy end and the dominance of agribusiness interests begin?" In this article I argue that the roots of this transformation lie in the origins of the agricultural welfare state and the overlapping of its birth with distinct eras in America's racial orders-those moments in time when political players mobilized coalitions and institutions around racial issues such as slavery, Reconstruction, or the segregated state of the Jim Crow order. As a result of these historical overlaps, the agricultural welfare state was shaped in surprising and not-wellunderstood ways by America's racial orders. In order to trace these two intertwining aspects of racial governance and agricultural welfare state development, I provide a reinterpretation of the development of the agricultural welfare state from its Civil War origins to its New Deal transformation. I show that, from 1865 to 1964, the confluence of racial orders, partisan alignments, and congressional orders created an agricultural welfare state in which African Americans were variously included and excluded in a pattern of "two-tier" citizenship. The broader racial governance aims of the Jim Crow order also had a significant role in shaping the development of the organizational ethos and administrative structures and practices within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The practice of "two-tier" agricultural citizenship, which initially affected only African American and other minority farmers, was gradually extended to reflect the divide between large commercial farmers and the rural poor (including small farmers). The results from this analysis strengthen our understanding of how the American welfare state has been shaped-in particular, the ways in which racial governance and racial orders are deeply embedded in the American state building process.

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An African American Welfare State

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship

From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship

Racial Orders, Congress, and the Agricultural Welfare State, 1865–1940

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