The Community Action Program and the Transformation of American Social Policy, 1964-present PDF Download

Author: Ryan LaRochelle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social sciences and state
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This dissertation examines transformations in the governance of American social policy since the 1960s through a case study of the Community Action Program (CAP), one of the central programs of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The CAP bypassed state and local governments and delivered federal funds directly to newly established nonprofit organizations known as community action agencies (CAAs). This ultimately led to the emergence of an increasingly vast nonprofit sector that has become deeply woven into the fabric of the modern American welfare state. CAAs originally provided diverse groups of low-income citizens with opportunities to actively participate in policy design and administration. The program emphasized the importance of local initiative and drew upon American ideals of self-help, self-sufficiency, and personal resourcefulness. The CAP never established a firm base of support, and has thus been subject to retrenchment and dismantlement since the mid-1960s. Over the past fifty years, policy makers with diverse motives and objectives have sought to decentralize and defund the antipoverty program. The CAP has persisted, but it Congress and conservative presidents have significantly reformed and reoriented it. Drawing on insights from the scholarship on American political development, policy history, and public policy, this dissertation shows how policies can develop in disjointed, uneven ways over time. Policies can simultaneously produce both self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedback effects. The CAP’s architects argued that the War on Poverty needed to be fought primarily by local communities with help from the federal government. By highlighting the importance of communities’ own understanding of the poverty problem, the CAP paradoxically aligned with conservative efforts to delegate social policy making authority to the states in the 1970s and 80s. The CAP’s political and administrative history provides new insights into the rise of the “hollow” state, the increasing role of the states in social policy delivery, the federal government’s increasing reliance on delegation and nonprofits in the administration of social policy, and broader processes of policy development and policy feedback. I argue that changes to the CAP and the wider system of U.S. social provision dramatically alter the relationship between low-income citizens and the state, which has important consequences for civic engagement and democratic participation in modern America.