CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,543Social Policy and Reform StudiesSocial Policy and Social Work in BrazilPolicy Transfer and Learning

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 96 of the 99 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States

HACKER, JACOB S.·2004·American Political Science Review
DOI 10.1017/s0003055404001121
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most programs have indeed resisted retrenchment, U.S. social policy has also offered increasingly incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change. Although some of this disjuncture is inadvertent—an unintended consequence of the very political stickiness that has stymied retrenchment—I argue that the declining scope of risk protection also reflects deliberate and theoretically explicable strategies of reform adopted by welfare state opponents in the face of popular and change-resistant policies, a finding that has significant implications for the study of institutional change more broadly.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s0003055404001121

Cites

96 of 96 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Immergut Ellen .1992 Health Politics: Interests and Institution in Western Europe.New York:Cambridge University, Press.
  2. Pierson Paul .2004 Politics in Time.Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.Forthcoming.
  3. Weaver R. Kent .1998“The Politics of Pensions: Lessons from Abroad.”In Framing the Social Security Debate,ed. R. Douglas Arnold .Washington, DC:Brookings Institution Press.
  4. Schickler Eric .2001 Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation in the U.S. Congress.Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 1,543

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
HACKER, J. S.
Affiliations
Yale University (US)
Corresponding author
HACKER, JACOB S.
ORCID
HACKER, JACOB S.
Venue
American Political Science Review
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2004-05
Volume
98
Issue
2
Pages
243-260
ISSN
  • 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5943
DOI
10.1017/s0003055404001121
OpenAlex
W2125398298
Cited by
1,543
References
99
Citations by year
2026: 70 · 2025: 83 · 2024: 77 · 2023: 102 · 2022: 53 · 2021: 95 · 2020: 133 · 2019: 123 · 2018: 98 · 2017: 74 · 2016: 81 · 2015: 70 · 2014: 81 · 2013: 57 · 2012: 63
FWCI
137.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 51 d)
Locations
  • American Political Science Review (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Social Policy and Reform Studies
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social Policy and Social Work in Brazil
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Policy Transfer and Learning
Keywords
welfare state retrenchment, social policy, risk protection, institutional change, social policy reform, United States welfare state, social change

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review