THE ROAD BACK TO TOCQUEVILLE? LOCAL COMMUNITIES AND RE-SCALING THE WELFARE STATE IN THE UNITED STATES

Transcription

1 THE ROAD BACK TO TOCQUEVILLE? LOCAL COMMUNITIES AND RE-SCALING THE WELFARE STATE IN THE UNITED STATES Luc Turgeon Department of Political Science University of Toronto 27 May 2005 Proto-paper prepared for: Claiming Citizenship in the Americas A Conference Organised by the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance Draft for discussion, please do not circulate

2 Introduction This paper argues that just as the post-war welfare state was legitimized through a citizenship discourse of social rights and national solidarity, an employment-first social policy agenda is currently being legitimized through a citizenship discourse that stresses, among other things, local responsiveness and participation through the empowerment of vaguely defined local communities. As such, the new citizenship discourse proposes a significant re-scaling of the constitutive elements of contemporary citizenship regimes towards the local scale. For conservatives, such discourse is often tainted by a dislike of the national community project of the New Deal, and nostalgia for the lost era of the neighborhood, the farm bureau and the selfhelp organizations. For progressives, the new citizenship discourse is grounded either in a rejection of the technocratic nature of the post-war welfare state or in the belief that the local space can be used as a form of resistance against the excesses of globalization. In both cases, the figure of the French political thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville looms large, especially among American conservative commentators. For example, in 1996, in the wake of the Clinton administration s welfare reform, conservative commentator Michael Barone proclaimed the return of Tocquevillean politics in a Tocquevillean country. 1 In an article entitled The Road Back to Tocqueville, Barone argued that centralization and hierarchy, which he contends had been the dominant characteristics of American life for most of the 20 th century, seemed to be yielding to decentralization and equality. In the conclusion of his article, contrasting the emerging decentralization forces to the forces of the New Deal/ status quo, he argued that Tocqueville America is naturally inclined to decentralization, devolution and markets, just as big-unit industrial America was inclined to centralization, command-and-control and bureaucracy. References to Tocqueville have also been present in the discourse of some of the most beloved political figures of the new right. George W. Bush, not known for his references to political theorists, has recently quoted Tocqueville in order to justify is faith-based initiative, stating that Tocqueville really figured out America in a unique way because he saw that Americans form association in order to channel the individualistic input of our society to enable people to serve a cause greater than themselves 2. Tocqueville understood, conservatives argue, that the civic commitments and communal skills critical to a free society could be developed only by sustained interaction within small, intimate, decentralized settings. 3 They approvingly mention his statement that the lawgivers of America did not suppose that a general representation of the whole nation would suffice. They also thought it right to give each part of the land its own political life so that there should be an infinite number of occasions for the citizens to act together and so that every day they should feel that they depended on one another. Conservatives therefore believe that the transformation of the American welfare state, first in its period of retrenchment under Reagan and of redesign in the 1990s is contributing to a rebirth of local, active citizenship regimes through the development of local mediating structures. 1 Michael Barone, The Road Back to Tocqueville, The Washington Post, January 7 th 1996, 2 Elizabeth Bulmiller, Bush Finds Affirmation in a Frenchman s Words, New York Times, 14 March 2005, Michael S. Joyce and William A. Schambra, A New Civic Life, in Michael Novak (ed.), To Empower People: From State to Civil Society. Washington: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1996,

3 This paper challenges the assertion of the new right that the welfare reforms of the last decade are leading to a return to a Tocquevillean type of politics. Drawing on the impact of the rescaling of the American welfare state on local governance arrangements in Pittsburgh, often considered a model of urban democratic renewal, I point to the ways in which recent changes to the American welfare state are limiting the possibility of developing locally based citizenship regimes. More specifically, I show how the new employment-first welfare state has lead to new interscalar arrangements that act as a limit on local innovations and responsiveness promoted by conservatives in their citizenship discourse. As such, this paper confirms the insights of analysts such as Ronan Paddisson, Jane Jenson, and Ron Martin and his collaborators who remind us of the significant discrepancies in the United Kingdom between the discourse of decentralization of the state and the complex multi-scalar reality of citizenship practices and governance arrangements 4. The Employment-First Welfare State The main focus of the post-ww2 welfare state was income transfers of the (national) state toward the male worker and his dependents though programs such as unemployment insurance and pensions. The postwar scholarship on the welfare state reflected these orientations. Whether in the functionalist and statistical work of Harold Wilensky, or in the more historical and qualitative work of Theda Skocpol, most welfare state analysts have focused on programs of income (re)distribution such as old age pension, unemployment insurance and family allowances. The objective of these policies was to ensure what Esping-Andersen presents as decommodification, that is when a person, as a matter of right, can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market. 5 As such, national welfare states and/or regimes differ in the extent to which social rights are granted on the basis of citizenship rather than performance. In his now well-known typology, Esping-Andersen identifies three clusters of countries that have adopted different approaches in terms of social citizenship: the Scandinavian model with a well developed and generous set of social protections, the conservative model associated with continental Europe and finally the less generous liberal model of the anglo-saxon world. Income transfers remain important today. As demonstrated by Paul Pierson, despite the intentions of neo-conservatives in the United States and the United Kingdom, the mobilization of largely middle-class constituencies has limited the capacity of the state to significantly evacuate important sectors of the welfare state, especially pensions and health care 6. Nonetheless, Sylvia Bashevkin has criticized rightly the neo-institutionalist perspective associated with Pierson for its lack of attention to programs targeted at minorities, women and marginalized groups such as the urban poor. 7 She suggests that welfare resilience is more important in policy sectors with 4 Ronan Paddison, Decoding Decentralisation: The Marketing of Urban Power?, Urban Studies 36: 1 (1999), ; Jane Jenson, Social Policy Shifts Scale and Sectors: Governance in France and Britain Compared, Paper prepared for the meeting of the International Sociological Association, Paris, September ; Ron Martin, Corinne Nativel, and Peter Sunley, Localizing Welfare-to-Work? Territorial Flexibility and the New Deal for Young People, Environment and Planning 20: 6 (2002): Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, London, Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Sylvia Bashvkin, Rethinking Retrenchment: North American Social Policy During the Early Clinton and Chrétien Years, Canadian Journal of Political Science 33: 1 (2000): 7-36; and Sylvia Bashvkin, Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work and Social Policy Reform. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

4 important vocal middle-class constituencies (such old-age pensions in the United States and health care in Canada) than in sectors that are targeted to minorities and marginalized groups. In light of changes in social assistance practices in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, Bashevkin argues that social policies have increasingly become repressive instruments that aim not so much to help people in poverty, but rather to punish them or dissuade them from engaging in behaviors that are presented as dangerous for the stability of a given society (for example teenage pregnancy or staying for prolonged periods of time on welfare). Accordingly, she presents this new welfare state as the duty state. As noted by Rianne Mahon and Robert Johnson 8, a multitude of terms have been used to describe this new paradigm such as the workfare state (especially in relation to the United States) or the social investment state (especially in relation of more progressive practices in Europe). Following Dan Finn, I will rather use the more politically neutral concept of employment-first welfare state 9. The employment-first welfare state constitutes a significant change in the scope and scale of the welfare state. First, as mentioned previously, the focus is increasingly on populations that are seen has potentially at-risk of social exclusion such as youth, single mothers and newcomers. Second, de-commodification is not so much the main objective has re-commodification, in the sense of orienting the welfare state not so much towards protecting people from the labor market as helping them to integrate it. Indeed, the new social policy agenda points not so much to the danger of relying on the market as the danger of being excluded from it. It is worth quoting here at length a document of the OECD that has been at the forefront of the new social policy agenda, presenting the potential risks associated with social exclusion: The socially excluded, the outsiders, the underclass, benefits dependency, the new poor : under a variety of labels, there is concern in many OECD countries that there is a section of the community that faces extraordinary barriers to full participation in the labour market and society. The results are well known: benefit dependency leads, sooner or later, to financial deprivation. Access to public services may be denied because of lack of address or employment record. Households are no longer in control of their own destiny. Health status may be damaged by poor diet and living conditions. Upon reaching retirement, lack of contributions to employment-based public pension schemes leads to continued reliance on welfare benefits. Children grow up without examples of the normal status of work in society, increasing the risk that disadvantage is transmitted across generations. In some countries, deprived areas or even regions become detached from the modern economy, becoming unable to take advantage of any improvements in the macroeconomic environment 10. In order to fight social exclusion, according to the OECD, policy makers must develop employment-oriented social policies, which it defines as an emphasis on making social protection compatible with employment through the giving of support to those in employment as well as those without jobs. Anthony Giddens, one of the strongest proponents of a renewed, social investment welfare state, argues that such a commitment entails investment in human capital wherever possible, rather than direct provision of economic maintenance. 11 Similarly, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair argues that the best defense against social exclusion is 8 Rianne Mahon and Robert Johnson, NAFTA, the Redesign and Rescaling of the Welfare State. Ottawa: Carleton University, Speakers Corner Serie, Dan Finn, The Employment-First Welfare State: Lessons from the New Deal for Young People. Social Policy and Administration 37: 7 (2003), OECD, A Caring World: The New Social Policy Agenda, Paris, OECD, 1999, 11 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: A Renewal of Social Democracy. London: Polity, 117.

5 having a job, and the best way to get a job is to have a good education, with the right training and experience. 12 Favoring the insertion of the socially excluded into work requires the channeling of resources to a range of human and social services, among them early childhood education, training and placement programs for social assistance recipients, and programs of lifelong learning. What is unique about this new welfare state agenda is the fact that it crosses the traditional social policy boundaries, aiming to secure tighter links between social, economic and labor policies in order to improve the capacity of people to integrate the labor market. 13 Investing in the skills of a population is presented as essential, both as an instrument of economic development and also as an instrument of social integration. It is in that perspective that the growing importance of human services over the last decade must be understood 14. If Pierson and Esping-Anderson have pointed to this gradual shift of the welfare state, an important element missing from their analysis is a change in the geography of operation of the state. As argued by Geddes and Le Galès: Esping-Andersen underlines the major challenges for welfare states but he and his colleagues typically underestimate a number of silent changes taking place in many countries. Because they are concerned with the national institutional arrangements and the trade-off between employment and equity, and also because they are keen to demonstrate that despite external pressures, national welfare states are not simply privatized and in decline, they do not address the issue of internal reorganization of welfare states 15. While income transfers were establishing a direct link between the political center and citizens, social services entail the development of local partnerships, linking governmental actors from different levels of the state with private for-profit and non-profit groups. This process is leading to what a growing body of literature describes re-rescaling or the politics of scale, which Brenner defines as the production, reconfiguration or contestation of particular differentiations, orderings and hierarchies among geographical scales 16. Like Jane Jenson, I view this process of re-scaling as a consequence of political pressure within the universe of political discourse to re-define the responsibilities of sectors (especially the role of local community via partnership). 17 More precisely, as I will argue in the next section, just as the welfare state of the post-war period was justified both by experts and politicians on the 12 Tony Blair in the Foreword to: Social Exclusion Unit, Bridging the Gap: New Opportunities for year olds not in education. London: Social Exclusion Unit. 13 Howard Jacob Karger, Ending Public Assistance: The Transformation of US Public Assistance into Labour Policy, Journal of Social Policy 32: 3 (2003): For the sole state of Pennsylvania, for example, the total outlay for human services currently approaches 25 billions, nearly one-third more than in Mike Geddes and Patrick Le Galès Local Partnerships, Welfare Regimes and Local Governance: A Process of Regime Restructuring? In Mike Geddes and John Bennington, eds. Local Partnerships and Social Exclusion in the European Union. New Forms of Local Social Governance? London: Routledge, Neil Brenner, The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflection on Scalar Structuration, Progress in Human Geography 25: 4 (2001), Jane Jenson, Social Policy Shifts Sector and Scale, op. cit.

6 grounds of providing equal (social) rights to citizens, the current process of welfare state redesign and re-scaling has also been justified through a scalar discourse about citizenship that stresses, among other things, local participation, local autonomy and responsiveness to the needs of local communities. Citizenship Regimes, the Welfare State and Local Communities Jane Jenson defines a citizenship regime as the institutional arrangements, rules and understanding that guide and shape concurrent policy decisions and expenditures of states, problem definitions by states and citizens and claim-making by citizens. A citizenship regime encodes paradigmatic representation of identities, of the national as well as the model citizen and the non-citizen. It also encodes representations of the proper and legitimate social relations among and within these categories, as well as the borders of public and private. It makes, in other words, a major contribution to the definition of politics which organizes the boundaries of political debate and problems recognition in each jurisdiction.. As argued by Jenson and Papillon, a citizenship regime has three dimensions 18. First, through formal recognition of rights (civic, political, cultural, as well as individual and collective) it establishes the conditions of inclusion and exclusion of a political community. In doing so, it identifies those entitled to full citizenship status and those who only, in effect, hold second-class status. Second, a citizenship regime prescribes democratic rules of the game for a polity such as the institutional mechanisms giving access to the state, legislatures and courts and the modes of participation in civic life and public debates. Third, through the recognition of formal status to individual as well as its use of cultural and historical references to qualify the community, a citizenship regime also contributes to the definition of the national community. It is though the exercise of- or claims for- citizenship rights and democratic practices that the borders of belonging and collective identities are defined. In recent years, Jenson has added a fourth dimension, that is the responsibility mix, which involves the roles and relationships among four sectors: markets, state, families and communities. This later aspect is the main focus of our investigation. Citizenship regimes have historically been linked to cities. As described by Max Weber in The City, it is in the cities of Ancient Greece and Rome that citizenship developed as the privileged status of a limited number of men. Modern citizenship regimes, on the other hand, have intrinsically been linked with the nation-state, especially following the development of the postwar welfare compromise. T.H. Marshall, the leading student of social citizenship in the postwar period, viewed the welfare state as providing (social) citizenship rights no matter where one lived, independent of his or her class status. As such, the scale of citizenship associated with the welfare state was resolutely national. Indeed, one of the central objectives of the national welfare state was the promotion of national solidarity. According to Marshall, the different 18 Jane Jenson and Martin Papillon, The Changing Boundaries of Citizenship: A Review and Research Agenda. In Modernizing Governance: A Preliminary Exploration. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. This paragraph is taken from Martin Papillon and Luc Turgeon, Nationalism s Third Way? Comparing the Emergene of Citizenship Regimes in Quebec and Scotland. In Conditions of Diversity in Multinational Societies, ed. Alain-G Gagnon et al. Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy, 2003,

7 universal (national) programs of the post-war period such as health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, while not guaranteeing equality of income, guaranteed at least an equality of status that was reinforcing the bonds of national citizenship. Moreover, according to Marshall, social citizenship rights, delivered by the welfare state, were a prerequisite for the fuller exercise of civil and political rights that had developed in a previous era. As such, a focus on universal social rights became the dominant discourse about social citizenship. This dual focus on the national scale and rights was significantly different from the previous era, where the focus was on local provisions and participation. Indeed, another tradition in the study of citizenship and the welfare state, one that has for long been ignored, focused on local autonomy rather than national uniformity. Best represented by the work of W.A. Robson in Britain, this localist perspective presents the story of the twentieth century as one of constant decline of the local welfare state and local citizenship in the face of the all-encompassing national welfare state 19. According to Robson, few people today appear to understand the essential role of local government in the welfare state. I cannot comprehend how a society call itself a welfare state unless it strives to ensure the widest possible participation by the citizens in the exercise of political power 20. Localists such as Robson celebrate local diversity rather than the imposition of national uniformity. According to Powell and Boyne, while national social rights associated with the postwar social citizenship discourse relate to equality, local political rights relate to responsiveness. Far from being seen as evidence of failure, geographical variations in welfare programs are viewed by localists as resulting from the response of local authorities to the demands of their citizens. This localist perspective is quite similar to Tocqueville s view that local participation is essential to genuine citizenship and democracy. Similarly, proponents of a growing role of local communities in the welfare state argue that a renewal of local autonomy is essential to the revitalization of local democracies based on genuine partnerships between individuals, associations and government. In the United States, as in the United Kingdom, the re-design of the welfare state is in fact often justified on the grounds that it will increase both local autonomy and the participation of civil society organizations in governance arrangements and by extension, of citizens 21. It is important to stress that this local, -civic republican one might say-, perspective on citizenship and the welfare state did not disappeared in the years after Robson lamented the decline of local autonomy. In the 1960s, numerous social activists criticized the technocratic nature of the welfare state and called for more local autonomy in order to develop innovative and progressive social projects. As mentioned in the introduction, such approach is still present in the discourse of many progressive commentators. Yet, in recent years, it is mainly conservatives in the United States who have promoted a redesign of the welfare state as a way to return to the local community approach to citizenship. In a way similar to Robson, Michael Joyce and William Schambara lament the fact that the rise 19 For a presentation of the work of Dobson, see Martin Powell and George Boyne, The Spatial Strategy of Equality and the Spatial Division of Welfare, Social Policy and Administration 35:2 (2001), On Robson s view of the local welfare state, see W.A. Robson, Labour and Local Government, Political Quaterly 24: 1 (1953): and W.A. Robson, Local Government in Crisis. London: George Allen and Unwin. 20 W.A. Robson quoted in Powell and Boyne, op. cit., p Another dimension, one explored by Bashvkin, is the notion of responsibility and duty.

8 of a national community in the wake of the New Deal, would mean, in essence, that citizen involvement in public affairs was reduced from active, intense, face-to-face problem solving on a daily basis to passively casting a lonely, solitary ballot once in a great while for a handful of offices 22. They view the presidency of Ronald Regan as the beginning of this return to more democratic local communities: Thus was Carter replaced by this century s most consistent and eloquent critic of federal power and spokesman for the reinvigoration of local communities. Ronald Regan promised an end to the state of affairs in which thousands of towns and neighborhoods have seen their peace disturbed by bureaucrats and social planners through busing, questionable education programs and attack on family unity. He called instead for an end to gigantism, and for a return to a human scale the scale of the local fraternal lodge, the church, the book club, the farm bureau and pursued that concept through budget reductions, block grant, a program of private sector initiatives, and a (new) New federalism. 23 Discussing Clinton s embrace of the communitarian discourse, the authors asked rhetorically: What explains an erosion of the national community so severe that even the Democratic party itself now hesitates to speak up for it? They answer by arguing that the national community project of the period prior to the arrival to power of Ronald Regan, strains to create, artificially and at the level of the nation, a mutuality and oneness that appear readily and naturally only at the level of the family or local community. On the other hand, the positive agenda, associated with the two Republican revolutions (first the Regan and then the Gingrich revolution) has for its main objective to empower civic institutions, local governments, families and citizens to make the public decision and carry out the public tasks that really count. This includes especially the most significant decisions and tasks within the realm of social policy- the economic, social, educational, and moral sustenance of the youngest, oldest, poorest, and most vulnerable. 24 Whereas localist such as Robson focused on local government as the main agent of development, the discourse of the conservative neo-tocquevilleans focuses rather on the development of partnership and governance arrangements within vaguely defined local communities. In short, as the post-war Keynesian welfare state was justified in part through a scalar citizenship discourse of national solidarity and social rights, the new social policy agenda has been justified through a discourse stressing how devolution and privatization, by giving more power to local communities, will increase local autonomy and responsiveness, citizen participation and civil society s involvement in governance arrangements. The claim therefore of conservatives is how current developments can potentially contribute to the development of local citizenship regime, providing rights, significant participatory opportunities and a sense of belonging of citizens that can lead to a sense of empowerment and responsibility towards the community. Yet, there are good reasons to be skeptical of this discourse. As Johnson and Mahon argues, the current process of devolution in liberal welfare state does not simply means a transfer in power downward. They propose that what is rather occurring is a complex reconstitution of power 22 Joyce and Schambara, A New Civic Life, op. cit., p.1 23 Ibid, p Ibid, p. 29. I underline.

9 relationships within and between different scales, a process in which the elaboration of new interscalar rule regimes is happening 25. The next section explores the transformation of such intescalar rule regimes in the United States over the last twenty-five years before turning briefly to the impact of these reforms on citizenship practices at the local level. From Retrenchment to Redesign in the United States In the discourse of certain conservative neo-tocquevilleans, the Reagan era of new Federalism and the Contract with America period following the congressional election of 1994 share a desire to curtail the role of government and to transfer responsibilities of government to local communities. Although both movements resulted in important changes in the post-war welfare architecture, they constituted significantly distinct moments in the transformation of the welfare state in the United States. To use the terminology of Peck and Tickell, while the Reagan era can be characterized as a period of roll-back or shallow neoliberalism, the post-contract with America period can be characterized as one of roll-in neoliberalism. They argue that this new neoliberalism is increasingly associated with the aggressive reregulation, disciplining, and containment of those marginalized or dispossessed by the neoliberalization of the 1980s. My contention here, which will be demonstrated later in a short discussion of the case of Pittsburgh, is that both movements had a distinctive impact on local communities in the United States. Welfare State Retrenchment under Reagan Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, arguing famously in his inaugural address, Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is our problem. Yet, Reagan s project was not one of significant redesign of the welfare state, but rather a roll-back of some of the programs that had been developed in the wake of Johnson s War on Poverty. Some analysts even argued that Reagan s action might have allowed the pursuit of the New Deal experience. Conlan, for example, made the following argument at the end of Reagan s two mandates: In some respects, however, the welfare state is stronger today Just as the New Deal helped save capitalism from its own worst excesses, so Reagan s agenda has trimmed questionable programs and answered concerns about governability and uncontrolled governmental growth. As a result, the underpinnings of popular support for the welfare state are in some ways stronger today than when Ronald Reagan took office 26. Most of the major cuts of the Reagan era were contained in the 1981 and 1982 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Acts. The administration proposed to cut antipoverty programs by lowering benefits and tightening eligibility. A number of programs were targeted for funding cuts, including Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infant and Children, food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and Assistance to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the main social assistance program targeted to the poor 27. Although a 1982 proposal that would have exchanged federal responsibility for fully funding Medicaid for the state assumption of AFDC and the food stamps program was rejected (it was in fact never introduced in Congress), states 25 Mahon and Johnson, NAFTA, the Redesign and Rescaling, op. cit., Timothy Conlan, New Federalism: Intergovernmental Reform from Nixon to Reagan. Washington: The Brooking Institution, 1988, Charles Noble, Welfare as We Knew it, op. cit.,

10 were nonetheless allowed to start experimenting with welfare reform, as the administration granted increasing numbers of section 1115 waivers allowing states to vary from the requirements of federal statute. Such trends would continue and in fact accelerate under both the Bush and the early Clinton administrations 28. Overall, the continuous strength of Democrats in Congress limited the ability of the Reagan s administration of implementing all of its promise reforms. Nonetheless, the budget cuts and changes to eligibility rules had a considerable impact. Changes in eligibility rules forced around working poor families off the rolls, and individuals lost food stamp benefits. Housing appropriations were cut by a third in 1981 and cut again in The 1960s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) was eliminated and replaced by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which eliminated funding for direct job creation 30. Moreover, Congress consolidated seventy-seven categorical programs into nine new or revised block grants 31. Cities were especially hit by the Reagan revolution. With the elimination of general revenue sharing and the state-oriented arrangements of the Reagan block grants, many cities that used to receive direct federal funding through Great Society Programs and Nixon s New Federalism saw these transfers completely abolished 32. Nonetheless, this period saw a surge in state and local innovations in sectors such as education, housing and workforce development that partly confirms the connection made by conservative neo-tocquevilleans between the retreat of the federal government and the rise of state and local communities. In cities especially, the 1980s saw the rise and expansion of the Community Development Corporations movement through the development of partnerships between local government, national and local foundations, and the nonprofit sector 33. Yet, the story of the 1980s is also one that challenges the conservative narrative of less government. One of the reasons for this surge of innovations at the state and local level, as demonstrated by Conlan, was higher tax collections, broadened tax bases, and additional user fees that made up for declines in federal funding 34. As such, the Reagan revolution did not lead to a fundamental re-design of the welfare state. As argued by Charles Noble, Ronald Reagan took the conservative revolution considerably further than Nixon, but also stopped short of challenging the foundation of liberal social policy. Contrasting his efforts to of the Republican leaders who came to dominate the Congress after 1994, he argues that the latter targeted not only the Great Society but the New Deal as well; the goal was not only to roll back the War on Poverty, but to challenge the very idea of federal 28 Pamela Winston, Welfare Policy-Making in the States: the Devil in Devolution. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002, Charles Noble, op. cit., p On JTPA, see Gordon Lafer, The Job Training Charade. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Timothy Conlan, From New Federalism to Devolution: Twenty-Five Years of Intergovernmental Reform. Washington: Brookings Institutions Press, 1998, Timothy Conlan, New Federalism, op. cit., On the history of this movement, see Jordan Yin, The Community Development System: Urban Politics and the Practice of Neighborhood Redevelopment in two American Cities from the 1960s to the 1990s (Ohio, Minnesota). Unpublished Phd Dissertation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Timothy Conlon, New Federalism, op. cit.,

11 entitlements. 35 The period nonetheless marked a certain re-scaling of the welfare state, as states, cities and community groups increasingly came to make key decisions and provide numerous services in social policy sectors that had been historically marked by the leadership of the federal government. Such a period of local innovations would indeed turn out to be essential to the process of welfare state re-design, as Republican federal politicians would actively push for the national adoption of the most conservative regulations developed in states such as Wisconsin and in cities such as Riverside (California). Roll-out Neoliberalism in the Wake of the Contract with America Although associated with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) of 1996, workfare was first resurrected with the passage in 1988 of the Family Support Act, which established the Job Opportunity and Basic Skill program (JOBS). JOBS required each state to enroll 20% of their recipients in a training or job search activity and required them to finance 40% of the programs. In reality, few states actively embraced the human capital approach of the program, and eligibility determination continued to dominate the organizational culture of many social service agencies 36. JOBS was a failure, and AFDC caseloads increased by 2.1 millions from 1990 to 1992, and in 1991 states spend only half of their available federal funds for job training 37. It is in that perspective that Bill Clinton came to power with a promise to end welfare as we know it. The original Clinton proposal, which drew on experiments conducted in different states under waivers from the federal government, attached various conditions to the payments of AFDC benefits. Among them were requirements that recipients actively seek work in order to avoid benefit reductions. The proposal offered incentives to welfare recipients to raise their educational and skills levels, receive day care and medical support, and benefit from job placement and career services 38. Finally, the proposal incorporated a two-year limit to receive cash payments, after which recipients were expected to become employed in the private sector, or in subsidized public of private jobs through the proposed WORK program. The Republican election in 1994 changed significantly the dynamic of welfare reform as Republicans successfully challenged the most progressive aspect of the Clinton plan and proposed harsher restrictions on recipients. In the wake of a re-election campaign, Clinton capitulated and signed PRWORA, which abolished the AFDC program and created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The new program ended the entitlement provision of AFDC by which funding for the program was not subject to budgetary limitations, as states received a block grant that was set at the 1994 level of support. Despite the claim of allowing state and local flexibility, the block imposed significant constraints on states willing to pursue a more progressive course of action. Among the restrictions are: (1) families cannot receive aid for more than two consecutive years or five cumulative years; (2) teenage parents are ineligible if 35 Charles Noble, Welfare as We Knew it: A Political History of the American Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, See on that topic Joel F. Handler, The Poverty of Welfare Reform. New Haven: Yale University Press, Howard Jacob Karger, Ending Public Assistance, op. cit., James Midgley, The United States: Welfare, Work and Development, International Journal of Social Welfare 10 (2001), 287.

12 not living with parents or in state-approved living arrangements; (3) teenage parents are ineligible if not attending school; (4) families with adults not paying child support or not cooperating with paternity identification are ineligible; (5) single parents can receive aid for two consecutive years but only if seeking employment or receiving training for a job; (6) work requirements are imposed on recipients, and states must ensure that half of recipients are working by the year The program also established sanctions in order to ensure that welfare recipients conform to the requirements of the legislation and behave in socially desirable ways 39. Participants can be sanctioned for failing to attend work orientation session or for failure to show up at a job interview. Many governors complained at the time that such requirement constituted federal micromanagement. 40 An important disposition of TANF was that the state had to maintain 80% of their current welfare spending level. As part of the legislation, states were permitted to use a portion of TANF funds to finance not simply income transfers but also a variety of work readiness, child care, and human service activities delivered by nonprofit and faith-based organizations. With the economic boom and the significant decline in welfare rolls, states were able to use part of the block grant to boost social services spending. By 1999, for example, spending on cash and workbased assistance under the welfare program had fallen to 60%, leaving 40% of TANF money for a variety of programs such as child care, work readiness, drug abuse treatment, and related purposes that would largely been delivered by private for-profit and nonprofit groups at the local level 41, although many of these funds often would have been unspent by states wary of an eventual increase in welfare rolls 42. Nonetheless, the 1990s saw a significant increase in the nonprofit organizations responsible for the delivery of human services 43. The above picture does not correspond to the scalar narrative of neo-tocquevilleans of the return of local communities. The federal government remains more than ever in fact the scale that set the rules that are guiding the re-design of the American welfare state. As such, the situation in the United States is similar to Peter Graefe s contention about Canada; that the national scale remains the scale responsible for agenda-setting 44. In fact, Gronbjerg and Smith argue that the new welfare reform represents greater federal control over welfare services than before 45. What is evident, nonetheless, from the Welfare reform of the last decade, is that the interscalar rule regime associated with welfare reform is not conducive to progressive forms of the 39 IBID, Pamela Winston, Welfare Policy Making in the States, op. cit., 44; see also Jack Torry and Jan Ackerman, Santorum Wants to Keep Federal Control Over State Use of Welfare Funds, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 16 April 1995, B Lester M. Salamon, The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America. Washington: Brookings Institutions Press, 2001, Steve Levin, State, Activists at Odds Over Unspent U.S. Welfare Funds, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 24 February 2000, A Eric C. Twombly, Human Service Nonprofits in Metropolitan Areas during Devolution and Welfare Reform, Charting Civil Society (The Urban Institute), no. 10 (2001), Peter Graefe, State Restructuring, Social Assistance and Canadian Intergovernmental Relations: Same Scales, New Tune, Paper prepared for the Towards a Political Economy of Scale Conference, York University, Toronto, February 5 th Kirsten A. Gronjberg and Steven Rathgeb Smith, Nonprofit Organizations and Public Policies in the Delivery of Human Services, in Charles T. Clotfelter and Thomas Ehrlich (eds.), Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999,

13 employment-first welfare state. First, TANF imposed from the top significant restrictions on the ability of subnational governments and local service providers to develop progressive alternatives, especially the requirement of a 50% decline in welfare rolls which lead to a rush to put people to work of any sort. Second, social advocacy organizations in the United States were mainly national organizations and had historically a weak state presence. As argued by Pamela Winston, the national liberal advocacy groups, social service organizations, and public interest groups that had gained power in Washington since the 1960s would be largely replaced by a range of organizations in the fifty states, effectively defunding the left in the nation s capital. In addition, as of 1994 most of the nation s governors were Republican, and state legislature were moving in that direction. 46 Third, local social service delivery systems in the United States were often badly financed either because of limited transfers from the state and/or because of the political fragmentation of metropolitan regions favoring lower taxes and an emphasis on economic development. In the words of Peck, the process of welfare/workfare restructuring cannot be reduced to one of national state withdrawal or to some benign process of zero-sum rescaling. Rather, in the course of the restructuring process, new institutional and regulatory structures are rolled out, while national states typically retain or acquire key functions as orchestrators of ostensibly devolved policy systems. 47 In the next section, I briefly show how such interscalar rules are contributing to a transformation of local communities, especially in the nonprofit sector, that is in many ways far different from the role that Tocqueville ascribed to them. The Nonprofit Sector and the Local Welfare State in Pittsburgh after Welfare Reform Sandra Bach defines the local welfare state as the constellation of state-societal institutions within the political boundaries of city-regions that provide welfare state services aimed at reducing income and social disparities and promoting social equity and inclusion. 48 The local welfare state of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny County to which it belongs is currently composed of nearly 400 agencies under contract with the county s Department of Human Services. On average, more than poor residents will seek the help of these agencies on an annual basis. Each year, more than half a billion dollars flow into Allegheny County from 80 different sources to fund 560 human service programs. Yet, the capacity of the County to respond to the needs of its poorer citizens, especially those of the inner-city, has been limited because of rising demands in the wake of the welfare reform, the fiscal crisis of the region (resulting from an economic downturn and high level of debt following the major investment in cultural and sport amenities in the 1990s) and the high political fragmentation of the region which favors the interest of the largely middle-class residents of Pittsburgh s suburbs. As a result, service 46 Pamela Winston, Welfare Policy-Making in the States: The Devil in Devolution, op. cit., Jamie Peck, Political Economies of Scale: Fast Policy, Interscalar Relations, and Neoliberal Workfare, Economic Geography 78: 3 (2002), Sandra Bach, The Development of the Urban Welfare State: A Case Study of the Regional Municipality of York. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Ottawa: Carleton University, 2003, 3.

14 agencies were spending in 2000 an average of 3,712$ per resident in poverty, significantly less that similar cities such as Cleveland (4,550$), Baltimore (5,221$) and Buffalo (4,108$) 49. Despite this rather bleak picture, Pittsburgh has regularly been presented as a model of innovation. In the early 1980s, the city developed rather progressive forms of governance combining economic and social regeneration objectives. As such, Pittsburgh has been presented as a Third Way city or an inclusive city 50. This is partly the result of the presence of very strong inclusive civic alliances dedicated to improving the socio-economic fate of the city. The main bloc of the civic alliance is the Allegheny Conference on Community Development that was created in 1944 to favor the revitalization of the business district. In the 1960s in the wake of the federal government s War on Poverty, the ACCD s main priority became the social regeneration of poor neighborhoods. Composed of local businesses and nonprofit institutions (especially foundations), the ACCD has played a key role in the 1980s, following the significant cuts of the Reagan administration, through the creation of the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development (PPND). The Partnership was created in 1983 with support from the Ford Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, as well as grants from local banks and the City of Pittsburgh Community Development Block Grant program 51. The PPND assists community development corporations in developing and implementing specific projects in sectors such as housing, childcare and job training. If many of these CDCs were originally mainly active in the housing field, they have also created their own employment training networks to connect with employers, training vendors and other community organizations. Moreover, the PPND has represented the needs of community organizations to a range of external funders, navigating for them in the words of Bradford the uncertainties resulting from government spending cutbacks and the opportunities presented by forging relationships with national foundations. 52 As such, the PPND engaged public, private, and nonprofit organizations in formulating community development strategies for Pittsburgh. Besides its capacity to develop partnerships, Pittsburgh has also often been noted for its capacity to engage citizens where they live, in their community and church. Often Pittsburgh is presented, and rightly so, as a neighborhood city. Clarke Thomas, a senior editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and regular commentator of the workforce and welfare issue in the city, remembers how he was intrigued when he first came to Pittsburgh by the strong sense of neighborhoods, reinforced by the boundaries of rivers, ravines, hills and railroads 53. He points, like many other students of Pittsburgh, to the relative stability of neighborhoods in comparison to cities that have gone through a similar process of economic and population decline, and its capacity to develop strong neighborhood-based partnerships and innovative approaches to 49 Carol J. De Vita and Eric C. Twombly, The Precarious Billion Dollar Sector: Nonprofit Human Services in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area. Washington: The Urban Institute, 2003, p Alberta M. Sbragia, Pittsburgh s Third Way : The Nonprofit Sector as a Key to Urban Regeneration, in Margaret Weir, Power, Money and Politics in Community Development, in Barbara Ferman, Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, Neil Bradford, 53 Clarke Thomas, Neighborhood City. Tending the pieces that make up Pittsburgh is still the key. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3 April 1996, A-19.

15 community development. It is this neighborhood-based approach to social problems that was increasingly challenged in the years following the adoption of PRWORA. Yet, in the wake of the new social policy agenda in the 1990s that followed the adoption of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, efforts to renew local partnerships and revitalize community organizations have been hindered considerably by two different processes: the guiding hand of the national and state government and the changing organizational capacity of an overwhelmed voluntary sector. These developments have stifled the pursuit of local innovative practices and local partnerships that are responsive to the needs of the community, increased the bureaucratization of the nonprofit sector, and decreased the capacity of the city to pursue its tradition of neighborhood-based service delivery. First, in the wake of Welfare Reform, numerous innovative training programs that had developed over the last twenty years were abandoned or significantly refashioned, since many welfare recipients could no longer participate and still meet the job-search and work requirements of the welfare law 54. Long established partnerships in the city have also suffered from the implementation of the welfare reform. The PPND s central position in the governing coalition of the city has in fact partly declined following the adoption of the welfare reform. As the main emphasis of the welfare reform became work-first, the PPND project of improving the fate of citizens through the revitalization of their neighborhood became less attractive for foundations, which increasingly came to favor programs of work readiness that promoted a quick attachment to the labor market. Second, whereas conservatives often proposed decentralization and privatization as a means to fight bureaucratization, the conditions attached to the recent welfare legislation have significantly increased the technocratization of community groups. Because states must meet certain federal targets, nonprofits must demonstrate that they have attained certain performance standards or risk losing their funding. Moreover, because of behavioral requirements imposed by the federal government, they are in the difficult position of policing welfare recipients. The result is a significant increase in time spent on reporting. Interviews with both members of nonprofit organizations and county agencies pointed specifically to the paperwork involved in obtaining services such as childcare for single mothers. A study of human services in the adjacent Cambria County found that county case managers and direct service staff were spending more than half their time on paperwork 55. And despite the hope that decentralization to the state and counties would lead to the development of more efficient partnerships across policy boundaries, especially in order to serve difficult clientele such as those suffering from mental health problems, there is little evidence so far of such development. In fact, it seems that the devolution of welfare and workforce programs to the state level have created the same problems of lack of coordination that have plagued the federal level since the 1960s. A map of the workforce development sector in Pennsylvania reproduced below illustrates the continuing lack of coordination across welfare to work and workforce development programs. 54 Steve Levin, Welfare s Reform s Upside, Downside, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2 November 1998, A Steve Twedt, The Fraying Safety Net, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 27 March, 2005, A-1.

16 Source: The Reinvestment Fund (Philadelphia, 2002) Despite the growing availability of funding for nonprofit social services, demands for these services have increased at a faster pace and nonprofit organizations have had to find new ways to raise revenues. Since the 1980s, government support for human services in the Pittsburgh area has gone from one-half of total funding to less than one-third. Direct government funding accounted for just 28% of nonprofit income in 2000, private donations and foundation support made up 20% and client fees were the biggest source of revenue at 40% 56. Despite the capacity of the sector to shift their source of revenue, in 2000 and 2001, about 40% of nonprofit organizations in Allegheny county could not manage their expenses. The result has been a decline in the range of services offered to the poorest citizens. The capacity to address the needs of local populations has especially declined for organizations that target clienteles such as the convicted or addicted. With a declining availability of governmental funds, these organizations have not been as successful in the world of fundraising, leading one analyst of the nonprofit sectors in Pittsburgh to argue that nonprofit groups survival may depend in the near future on their clients image 57. In such context of declining resources, foundations have increasingly called on nonprofit organizations to consolidate their services, abandon their neighborhood origins and move to become more specialized organizations that serve poor people throughout the city. In fact, whereas foundations were insisting in the 1970s and 1980s on the mobilization of neighborhood residents, they increasingly focus in the recent years on developing collaborative networks across neighborhood and cities, and improving managerial capacity 58. Indeed, in the words of Jordan Yin, CDCs have shifted in the 1990s from a movement to an industry that is moving away from its original goal of empowering citizens 59. With regards to the growing importance of private corporations in the delivery of welfare services such as training throughout the United States, it 56 Carol J. De Vita and Eric C. Twombly, Needed: New Thinking About Pittsburgh s Nonprofits, Urban Insitute, December , www,urban.org/urlprint.cfmid= Steve Twedt, Nonprofit Groups Survival May Depend on Clients Image, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 28 March 2005, A Dan Fitzpatrick, Community Groups Facing Pressure to Consolidate, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 17 May 1998, F Jordan Yin, The Community Development System, op cit.