Social Security: History and Politics from the New Deal (review)

In the debate over Social Security, ideology often postures as fact while partisan rhetoric displaces analysis. A subject so crucial to the future of the nation and every one of its citizens demands better treatment. Béland provides it in his remarkably clear, concise, and reliable history of Social Security.

Béland draws on both the remarkable recent scholarship on the history of the American welfare state and his own research in primary sources to write a history of Social Security from its origins through the privatization battles during the administration of President George W. Bush. He also attempts to refine theoretical discussions of public-policy formation. His particular contribution is to add an emphasis on the role of ideas to new institutionalist theory; concentration on political and state structures and officials has tended to minimize their importance.

Throughout the book, Béland draws instructive parallels between policy history in the United States and other nations, some of which will be familiar to U.S. readers—for instance, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adoption of social insurance in Germany and Britain. Others will be less well known, but no less pertinent—like the implications of more centralized policymaking in Canada or the greater role of private business in European policy formation. Overall, this book conveys a sharpened sense of what is distinctive about the U.S. experience, especially American-style federalism, which, Béland shows, has powerfully influenced the history of Social Security and other branches of the welfare state.

Béland's most controversial claim is that race had little impact on the origins and early history of Social Security. He argues that the reasons for the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the 1935 Economic Security Act, which created Social Security, reflected fiscal and administrative concerns rather than the influence of racist Southern members of Congress. Every other old-age social-insurance system, except for Sweden's, also has excluded them, he points out. Gender, however, exerted a powerful influence on legislation through conventional ideas about women's roles in the family and economy. In When Affirmative Action Was White (New York, 2005), Ira Katznelson, using the same body of recent scholarship as Béland, comes to exactly the opposite conclusion—namely, that for reasons having to do with race, Southern members of Congress demanded and won the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security's founding legislation. Both of these scholars are at least partly right because their explanations are not mutually exclusive. Administrative-fiscal and racial motivations were likely both at work, although this debate will surely continue.

Béland describes and evaluates the arguments of both Social Security privatizers (a not wholly accurate term, he shows) and their opponents. Nonetheless, some surprising omissions remain. He does not discuss the evidence pointing to the severe problems with Social Security privatization in Chile or consider the argument that, in the United States, a continued modest rise in productivity could wipe out the program's alleged demographically induced fiscal crisis. Nor, despite his emphasis on the role of private-sector benefits, does he deal with the politics and implications of iras and 401 (k) or (b) plans. It is, moreover, disappointing that Béland is so relentlessly even-handed after so lucid and fair an analysis. He resolutely refuses to take sides. But the abrupt and slightly evasive conclusion to his book is more a frustration with, than a criticism of, a work that offers much of value.