| The United States hosts a much larger sphere of privately provided social welfare goods and services than do other affluent western democracies. In the vast literature on the American welfare state, however, this defining feature of U.S. social policy has received limited attention and its political causes and consequences remain largely unexplored.;"Boundary Wars" explores the politics of the "American welfare regime," the complex of public and private social benefits that constitutes America's unusual social policy framework. Examining the political development of health and retirement benefits in the twentieth century, it explains why private social benefits have such a privileged place in U.S. social policy and why the role of these benefits differs so sharply across the health insurance and pension domains. In doing so, it shows that employment-based social benefits are deeply shaped by public policy and, in turn, critically influence the politics of public social programs.;At the theoretical core of the study is an explanatory framework that explicates the political differences between alternative means of achieving social welfare aims. This framework suggests that policies governing private benefits are less likely to redistribute income and risk than are public social programs and are more likely to develop through subterranean political channels and attract the support of political actors otherwise hostile to government intervention. It also shows that private social benefits have characteristic "policy feedback" effects that reshape political coalitions and preferences. Just as widely distributed public social benefits give rise to embedded institutions and vested interests, the extensive development of private social benefits has the potential to create formidable political obstacles to the extension of public insurance or provision. This, indeed, is a principal reason why opponents of public programs have historically championed private benefits and public policies supportive of them.;By uncovering and explaining the political struggles behind the development of the American welfare regime, "Boundary Wars" shows that the rise of private social benefits is as much a political story as the development of the welfare state, and no less constitutive of America's exceptional path. |
