Social policy and the local state: A study of municipal public assistance, unemployment relief, and social democracy in Germany, 1871-1914

The overarching goal of the thesis is to assess the ability of contending theories in political sociology and related fields to explain features of poor relief and unemployment policies in German cities between 1871 and 1914. The theories of the welfare state which are tested include "state-centered", "society-centered" (Modernization, Conflict, and Neo-marxist theories), and "culture-centered" approaches.; Materials for the study were gathered in German state and municipal archives and from the administrative and statistical publications of individual cities. The thesis combines qualitative social-historical methods with statistical analysis of a cross-sectional urban dataset covering the 94 largest cities in Imperial Germany.; The central explanatory problem in the thesis is to account for inter-city differences in the incidence, spending levels, and organizational characteristics of three forms of social policy: public assistance, emergency public works job creation, and unemployment insurance. Each program is first modeled separately and then contrasted with the other policies' patterns of determination.; The thesis also investigates general historical trends in German unemployment policy and offers an explanation of the transition from the regime of traditional poor relief to neo-corporatist policies.; None of the major theories taken in isolation provides an adequate explanation of the dynamics of the local welfare state. Against functional Marxist approaches, it is argued that municipal social policy was shaped in partial independence from employers' interests. Yet in contrast to the neo-Weberian state-centered view, the thesis shows that elites' policymaking was driven by political considerations of labor integration and societal order-maintenance. Local social policy was deeply conditioned by extra-state forces, including disruptive collective protests, industrial workers' organizations, and ideological discourses. In particular, the shifts from public assistance to more elaborate unemployment relief, and within the latter category the emergence of social insurance, can only be understood in the context of the socialist labor movement and a renaissance of middle-class social Liberalism.