The New Tammany Hall? Welfare, Public Sector Unions, Corruption, and Neoliberal Policy Regimes

This article addresses the ways in which neoliberal governance is constituted through networks of actors, organizations, policy ideas, and rhetorical justifications—what we can call a “neoliberal policy regime.” I outline both the contours of these regimes in general, and discuss the ways in which they have developed since the 1970s, a moment at which public-sector collective bargaining became generalized and in which urban fiscal crises began to open opportunities for the neoliberal reordering of urban policy. I will then discuss the episodes of welfare reform in Wisconsin and New York, and follow this with an analysis of rent-seeking networks. I then return to a discussion of how these policy regimes intervened in debates about public-sector unions fifteen years after the passage of federal welfare reform. In so doing, I will argue that in formal terms, we should expect actors in policy networks and policy regimes to seek advantages: that’s what politics is. But we can still trace the substantive consequences to others and private advantages derived by these actors as they engage in the policy process, and judge the ways in which charges of self-serving activity and corruption “play” in and through these regimes.