States of Dependency

Karen Tani's States of Dependency offers a complex understanding of how state development and bureaucratic capacity is created within a multijurisdictional polity. While social movements or individual members of Congress have played important roles in the expansion of the welfare state, Tani argues that national-level social welfare bureaucrats and “poverty lawyers” were critical and overlooked sources of support for welfare state expansion. Expanding state capacities in a multijurisdictional state is a tricky process: national-level bureaucrats had to rely on a mix of incentives and sanctions to push regional, state, and local actors toward a social welfare system based on tenets of modern governance: uniformity and equal treatment. This move toward rationalization jarred with the autonomous and powerful local and state agencies in charge of administering local poor relief in a crazy quilt of conflicting moralistic standards. Tani argues that national-level administrators and professional social workers turned to “rights language” to solve this massive governance problem. The implementers of this new national welfare state had devised ways to overpower or work around the local and state actors who were loath to give up their ability to discipline the poor of their communities. Through meticulous and revelatory archival work Tani shows that a “legalization approach,” which relied on “statutory and constitutional law,” allowed the national state to prevail (in retrospect, temporarily) over William J. Novak's “well-regulated” society, which persisted at the local level (William J. Novak, The People's Welfare, 1996, p. 1). These choices were consequential, as the welfare programs designed by these bureaucrats helped develop today's robust administrative state. The rights language deployed by welfare state administrators was not simply empty rhetoric; substantive procedural practices, including the right to fair hearings, the promulgation of equal protection principles, and state court litigation, helped embody these rights

Bureaucracy · Economics · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · State (computer science · Statutory law · Welfare · Welfare state · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

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