Karen J Morgan
Biographic Data
| ID | 807695 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen J Morgan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen J |
| FAMILY NAME | Morgan |
| SIGNATURE | MORGAN K J |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7426-2677 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 459 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Beyond workforce alliances: State capacity and mental health provision
The Politics of Childcare
The politics of childcare has become a vibrant area of research. This review analyzes the evolution of this research over several decades and identifies two phases of scholarship. The first phase concerned the limited public supports for childcare in most countries and how this reinforced a particular gender order. A second current of research took off as many countries expanded their childcare systems and highlighted the role of electoral politi…
Hostile Environments: State Infrastructural Power and the Exclusion of Unauthorized Migrants in Western Europe
The phrase “immigration enforcement” often calls to mind border policing or efforts to detain and deport unauthorized migrants, but governments also employ techniques of exclusion—denying migrants access to public and private resources. This article evaluates the implementation of these measures in three European countries to inform theorizing about state power. Drawing on and developing Mann’s concept of infrastructural power, I show how impleme…
European Social Policy Embraces Solidarity in a Crisis
Governments in Europe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by expanding their welfare systems to protect health, jobs, and incomes. The varied initiatives embody the principle of solidarity and demonstrate how welfare programs serve as a form of collective insurance against risk. But the twin health and economic crises also exposed gaps in coverage for many, including migrants and gig economy workers. Fiscal austerity, enforced by the European Unio…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Policing markets: The role of the social partners in internal immigration enforcement
In recent decades, governments have made labour markets sites of immigration enforcement through employer sanctions and other measures. In some countries, unions and employers’ associations facilitate implementation of these initiatives, while in others they openly or tacitly resist cooperation. This paper explores these patterns of cooperation and resistance through analysis of six countries. The method used is qualitative comparative analysis, …
Riding the Tiger: Managing Risk in U.S. Housing Finance and Health Insurance Welfare Markets
This article examines the political and economic dynamics of welfare markets in the USA. These marketplaces differ from other public–private welfare arrangements in that the state crafts and sustains these markets with the aim of using competition to promote cost-effective welfare provision. However, welfare markets face fundamental tensions between competition and stability that we trace to the allocation of risk between the state and private pr…
Leveraging identities: The Strategic Manipulation of Social Hierarchies for Political Gain
The Impoverished Rhetoric of the US Welfare State
A new book lays blame for the weak social safety net on political rhetoric that justifies government aid as an individual right and not a public good–a tradition that dates back to the New Deal
Gender, right-wing populism, and immigrant integration policies in France, 1989–2012
Immigrant integration has been on the political agenda in France since at least the late 1980s, yet starting in the early 2000s this issue became bound up with concerns about the oppression of minority women. This article examines the evolution of the issue over two decades, pinpointing when and why debates over integration took on a gendered cast. The article's explanation centres on two factors – the growing threat of the Front National coupled…
Process tracing and the causal identification revolution
The essays in this special issue of New Political Economy are welcome contributions to growing debates about the logic and methods of process tracing in the social sciences. The introductory essay
Introduction: Sonya Michel's Feminist, Comparative, and Historical Vision of Welfare, Care, and Social Reform
This is an introduction to a special issue honoring the life and work of Sonya Michel. The issue includes both personal and research essays that reflect many of Michel's intellectual interests—maternalism and female social reformers; gender and welfare states; migration and care—as well as the wider scholarly impact she has made on history and the social sciences
Obstruction ou réforme
Le Congrès présente un grand nombre de caractéristiques qui peuvent paralyser la procédure législative. Cet article se propose d’analyser à nouveau ce point de vue traditionnel à la lumière des changements importants du système de santé au cours des trois dernières décennies. L’adoption de ces réformes reflète des changements dans le fonctionnement du Congrès : un personnel administratif plus efficace et une centralisation du pouvoir par les diri…
Path Shifting of the Welfare State: Electoral Competition and the Expansion of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe
What explains the surprising growth of work-family policies in several West European countries? Much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change. Yet, over the past two decades, governments in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes, enacting paid leave schemes, expanded rights to part-time work, and greater investments in ch…
From 'Sick Man' to 'Miracle: Explaining the Robustness of the German Labor Market During and After the Financial Crisis 2008-09
What explains Germany's exceptional labor market performance during the Great Recession of 2008-09? Contrary to accounts that emphasize employment protection legislation or government policy (i.e., short-time work), this article argues that actions by firms-embedded in ever-changing coordinative institutional structures-were crucial. Firms chose to keep rather than shed labor, a strategy induced by (i) a 'toolkit' of flexible labor market instrum…
The Delegated Welfare StateMedicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy
'The Delegated Welfare State' tackles the federal government's increasing propensity in recent times to outsource governmental functions to the private sector.
“But Sometimes I Think . . . They Put Themselves in the Situation”: Exploring Blame and Responsibility in Interpersonal Violence
This article draws on narratives of volunteers working with women who have experienced violence. It explores how institutional discourses nurture a culture of blame and responsibility. Using qualitative data, it examines the ways in which women victims are seen as complicit in their own victimization. An indirect consequence of the blame/responsibility dichotomy is that victims are depicted as deserving their fate. There is, therefore, a culture …
Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States
This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts…
Caring Time Policies in Western Europe: Trends and Implications
The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison
This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resi…
The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy and Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization
The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy. By Christopher Howard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 260p. $29.95. Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization. By Sanford E. Schram. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 208p. $64.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. These two books on the American welfare state seek to challenge conventional understandings of redistributive policy and politics i…
The Political Path to a Dual Earner/Dual Carer Society: Pitfalls and Possibilities
What are the political pathways to the dual earner/dual caregiver model? Are most countries likely to attain only a partial transformation of policies and societies, rather than a full embrace of this model? This article examines the development of work-family policies in Western Europe to probe the politics and consequences of these programs. In many countries, the political context frustrates efforts to enact a unified, comprehensive vision lik…
Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States
While the extent of female participation in the labor force varies across western countries, most have experienced a substantial change in women's attachment to the world of paid work. Everywhere, this trend has raised two central questions related to the children of working mothers: Should mothers of young children work outside the home at all? And if so, who bears responsibility for assuring the care and well-being of their children? Comparing …
The "Production" of Child Care: How Labor Markets Shape Social Policy and Vice Versa
This article examines child care policies in three countries-France, Sweden, and the United States-to explore the links between labor markets and social policy and to probe the applicability of the “varieties of capitalism” literature to the human services. Countries differ in the extent to which they subsidize early childhood care and education programs, reflecting, in part, the nature of the child care workforce. In liberal market economies suc…
Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States
Until the early 1990s, Germany and the United States had similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program, whereas American reform efforts stalled. As conventional explanations of social policies—rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics—fail to explain the diverging trajectories, the authors show how differing federal structures shaped reform ef…
Path Shifting of the Welfare State: Electoral Competition and the Expansion of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe
What explains the surprising growth of work-family policies in several West European countries? Much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change. Yet, over the past two decades, governments in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes, enacting paid leave schemes, expanded rights to part-time work, and greater investments in ch…
Paid to Care: The Origins and Effects of Care Leave Policies in Western Europe
A number of European countries have adopted paid child care leaves and allowances in the name of parental choice and valuing care. We examine the origins and consequences of these policies in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and Norway. Care leave policies have been politically attractive to center‐right governments seeking to fight unemployment, contain spending on child care, and appeal to parents struggling to balance work and family. Yet gi…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
The "Production" of Child Care: How Labor Markets Shape Social Policy and Vice Versa
This article examines child care policies in three countries-France, Sweden, and the United States-to explore the links between labor markets and social policy and to probe the applicability of the “varieties of capitalism” literature to the human services. Countries differ in the extent to which they subsidize early childhood care and education programs, reflecting, in part, the nature of the child care workforce. In liberal market economies suc…
The Politics of Mothers' Employment: France in Comparative Perspective
Contemporary theories and typologies of welfare states in Western Europe assume that social democratic parties are the engine behind progressive policies on gender roles and on the participation of women in the labor force. The French case challenges these assumptions—this conservative welfare state, surprisingly, provides an extensive system of public day care along with other forms of support that facilitate mothers' employment. This article ex…
Forging the Frontiers Between State, Church, and Family: Religious Cleavages and the Origins of Early Childhood Education and Care Policies in France, Sweden, and Germany
European states differ tremendously in the extent to which their national education systems administer preschool programs, and whether or not these services can serve as day care for working parents. This article traces contemporary policy differences in three countries-France, Sweden, and Germany-to the effects of nineteenth-century conflicts between religious and secular forces over education. Intense, clerical-anticlerical conflict in France l…
The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison
This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resi…
The Political Path to a Dual Earner/Dual Carer Society: Pitfalls and Possibilities
What are the political pathways to the dual earner/dual caregiver model? Are most countries likely to attain only a partial transformation of policies and societies, rather than a full embrace of this model? This article examines the development of work-family policies in Western Europe to probe the politics and consequences of these programs. In many countries, the political context frustrates efforts to enact a unified, comprehensive vision lik…
Caring Time Policies in Western Europe: Trends and Implications
Gender, right-wing populism, and immigrant integration policies in France, 1989–2012
Immigrant integration has been on the political agenda in France since at least the late 1980s, yet starting in the early 2000s this issue became bound up with concerns about the oppression of minority women. This article examines the evolution of the issue over two decades, pinpointing when and why debates over integration took on a gendered cast. The article's explanation centres on two factors – the growing threat of the Front National coupled…
From 'Sick Man' to 'Miracle: Explaining the Robustness of the German Labor Market During and After the Financial Crisis 2008-09
What explains Germany's exceptional labor market performance during the Great Recession of 2008-09? Contrary to accounts that emphasize employment protection legislation or government policy (i.e., short-time work), this article argues that actions by firms-embedded in ever-changing coordinative institutional structures-were crucial. Firms chose to keep rather than shed labor, a strategy induced by (i) a 'toolkit' of flexible labor market instrum…
Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States
Until the early 1990s, Germany and the United States had similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program, whereas American reform efforts stalled. As conventional explanations of social policies—rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics—fail to explain the diverging trajectories, the authors show how differing federal structures shaped reform ef…
A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care
In 1971, a coalition of legislators and advocates put together a bill to establish the foundations of a public, universally available day-care system in the United States. Backed by Democrats, Republicans, and a highly mobilized set of interest organizations, the bill's middle-class appeal made it seem like a political sure bet in the months preceding the 1972 election season. Over the course of 1971, however, support for the bill eroded, and by …
Process tracing and the causal identification revolution
The essays in this special issue of New Political Economy are welcome contributions to growing debates about the logic and methods of process tracing in the social sciences. The introductory essay
Leveraging identities: The Strategic Manipulation of Social Hierarchies for Political Gain
Gender and the Welfare State: New Research on the Origins and Consequences of Social Policy Regimes
Hostile Environments: State Infrastructural Power and the Exclusion of Unauthorized Migrants in Western Europe
The phrase “immigration enforcement” often calls to mind border policing or efforts to detain and deport unauthorized migrants, but governments also employ techniques of exclusion—denying migrants access to public and private resources. This article evaluates the implementation of these measures in three European countries to inform theorizing about state power. Drawing on and developing Mann’s concept of infrastructural power, I show how impleme…
Policing markets: The role of the social partners in internal immigration enforcement
In recent decades, governments have made labour markets sites of immigration enforcement through employer sanctions and other measures. In some countries, unions and employers’ associations facilitate implementation of these initiatives, while in others they openly or tacitly resist cooperation. This paper explores these patterns of cooperation and resistance through analysis of six countries. The method used is qualitative comparative analysis, …
Riding the Tiger: Managing Risk in U.S. Housing Finance and Health Insurance Welfare Markets
This article examines the political and economic dynamics of welfare markets in the USA. These marketplaces differ from other public–private welfare arrangements in that the state crafts and sustains these markets with the aim of using competition to promote cost-effective welfare provision. However, welfare markets face fundamental tensions between competition and stability that we trace to the allocation of risk between the state and private pr…
The Politics of Childcare
The politics of childcare has become a vibrant area of research. This review analyzes the evolution of this research over several decades and identifies two phases of scholarship. The first phase concerned the limited public supports for childcare in most countries and how this reinforced a particular gender order. A second current of research took off as many countries expanded their childcare systems and highlighted the role of electoral politi…
An Hedonic Index for Breakfast Cereals
The hedonic index technique is used to estimate the implicit prices for units of breakfast cereal characteristics. Analysis showed that buyers value many attributes; the value placed on each is dependent upon the class of cereal evaluated. Results suggest this technique has potential for assessing buyer's purchasing behavior for nondurable goods
An Hedonic Index for Breakfast Cereals
The hedonic index technique is used to estimate the implicit prices for units of breakfast cereal characteristics. Analysis showed that buyers value many attributes; the value placed on each is dependent upon the class of cereal evaluated. Results suggest this technique has potential for assessing buyer's purchasing behavior for nondurable goods
A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care
In 1971, a coalition of legislators and advocates put together a bill to establish the foundations of a public, universally available day-care system in the United States. Backed by Democrats, Republicans, and a highly mobilized set of interest organizations, the bill's middle-class appeal made it seem like a political sure bet in the months preceding the 1972 election season. Over the course of 1971, however, support for the bill eroded, and by …
Gender and the Welfare State: New Research on the Origins and Consequences of Social Policy Regimes
Forging the Frontiers Between State, Church, and Family: Religious Cleavages and the Origins of Early Childhood Education and Care Policies in France, Sweden, and Germany
European states differ tremendously in the extent to which their national education systems administer preschool programs, and whether or not these services can serve as day care for working parents. This article traces contemporary policy differences in three countries-France, Sweden, and Germany-to the effects of nineteenth-century conflicts between religious and secular forces over education. Intense, clerical-anticlerical conflict in France l…
Child Care and the Liberal Welfare Regime: A Review Essay
A Review Essay of Vicky Randall, The Politics of Child Daycare in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sally S. Cohen, Championing Child Care (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Paid to Care: The Origins and Effects of Care Leave Policies in Western Europe
A number of European countries have adopted paid child care leaves and allowances in the name of parental choice and valuing care. We examine the origins and consequences of these policies in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and Norway. Care leave policies have been politically attractive to center‐right governments seeking to fight unemployment, contain spending on child care, and appeal to parents struggling to balance work and family. Yet gi…
The Politics of Mothers' Employment: France in Comparative Perspective
Contemporary theories and typologies of welfare states in Western Europe assume that social democratic parties are the engine behind progressive policies on gender roles and on the participation of women in the labor force. The French case challenges these assumptions—this conservative welfare state, surprisingly, provides an extensive system of public day care along with other forms of support that facilitate mothers' employment. This article ex…
The "Production" of Child Care: How Labor Markets Shape Social Policy and Vice Versa
This article examines child care policies in three countries-France, Sweden, and the United States-to explore the links between labor markets and social policy and to probe the applicability of the “varieties of capitalism” literature to the human services. Countries differ in the extent to which they subsidize early childhood care and education programs, reflecting, in part, the nature of the child care workforce. In liberal market economies suc…
Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States
Until the early 1990s, Germany and the United States had similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program, whereas American reform efforts stalled. As conventional explanations of social policies—rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics—fail to explain the diverging trajectories, the authors show how differing federal structures shaped reform ef…
Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States
While the extent of female participation in the labor force varies across western countries, most have experienced a substantial change in women's attachment to the world of paid work. Everywhere, this trend has raised two central questions related to the children of working mothers: Should mothers of young children work outside the home at all? And if so, who bears responsibility for assuring the care and well-being of their children? Comparing …
The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy and Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization
The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy. By Christopher Howard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 260p. $29.95. Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization. By Sanford E. Schram. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 208p. $64.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. These two books on the American welfare state seek to challenge conventional understandings of redistributive policy and politics i…
The Political Path to a Dual Earner/Dual Carer Society: Pitfalls and Possibilities
What are the political pathways to the dual earner/dual caregiver model? Are most countries likely to attain only a partial transformation of policies and societies, rather than a full embrace of this model? This article examines the development of work-family policies in Western Europe to probe the politics and consequences of these programs. In many countries, the political context frustrates efforts to enact a unified, comprehensive vision lik…
Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States
This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts…
Caring Time Policies in Western Europe: Trends and Implications
The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison
This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resi…
“But Sometimes I Think . . . They Put Themselves in the Situation”: Exploring Blame and Responsibility in Interpersonal Violence
This article draws on narratives of volunteers working with women who have experienced violence. It explores how institutional discourses nurture a culture of blame and responsibility. Using qualitative data, it examines the ways in which women victims are seen as complicit in their own victimization. An indirect consequence of the blame/responsibility dichotomy is that victims are depicted as deserving their fate. There is, therefore, a culture …
The Delegated Welfare StateMedicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy
'The Delegated Welfare State' tackles the federal government's increasing propensity in recent times to outsource governmental functions to the private sector.
From 'Sick Man' to 'Miracle: Explaining the Robustness of the German Labor Market During and After the Financial Crisis 2008-09
What explains Germany's exceptional labor market performance during the Great Recession of 2008-09? Contrary to accounts that emphasize employment protection legislation or government policy (i.e., short-time work), this article argues that actions by firms-embedded in ever-changing coordinative institutional structures-were crucial. Firms chose to keep rather than shed labor, a strategy induced by (i) a 'toolkit' of flexible labor market instrum…
Path Shifting of the Welfare State: Electoral Competition and the Expansion of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe
What explains the surprising growth of work-family policies in several West European countries? Much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change. Yet, over the past two decades, governments in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes, enacting paid leave schemes, expanded rights to part-time work, and greater investments in ch…
Obstruction ou réforme
Le Congrès présente un grand nombre de caractéristiques qui peuvent paralyser la procédure législative. Cet article se propose d’analyser à nouveau ce point de vue traditionnel à la lumière des changements importants du système de santé au cours des trois dernières décennies. L’adoption de ces réformes reflète des changements dans le fonctionnement du Congrès : un personnel administratif plus efficace et une centralisation du pouvoir par les diri…
Introduction: Sonya Michel's Feminist, Comparative, and Historical Vision of Welfare, Care, and Social Reform
This is an introduction to a special issue honoring the life and work of Sonya Michel. The issue includes both personal and research essays that reflect many of Michel's intellectual interests—maternalism and female social reformers; gender and welfare states; migration and care—as well as the wider scholarly impact she has made on history and the social sciences
Process tracing and the causal identification revolution
The essays in this special issue of New Political Economy are welcome contributions to growing debates about the logic and methods of process tracing in the social sciences. The introductory essay
The Impoverished Rhetoric of the US Welfare State
A new book lays blame for the weak social safety net on political rhetoric that justifies government aid as an individual right and not a public good–a tradition that dates back to the New Deal
Gender, right-wing populism, and immigrant integration policies in France, 1989–2012
Immigrant integration has been on the political agenda in France since at least the late 1980s, yet starting in the early 2000s this issue became bound up with concerns about the oppression of minority women. This article examines the evolution of the issue over two decades, pinpointing when and why debates over integration took on a gendered cast. The article's explanation centres on two factors – the growing threat of the Front National coupled…
Leveraging identities: The Strategic Manipulation of Social Hierarchies for Political Gain
Political science (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Welfare (14 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Welfare state (11 works)