Drew Halfmann

Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for U.S. Social Policy

The WPA was the most expensive and politically prominent U.S. social program of the 1930s, and the generosity and very nature of U.S. social policy in its formative years was contested through the WPA. In this article, an institutional politics theory of social policy is elaborated that incorporates the influence of both institutional conditions and political actors: Institutions mediate the influence of political actors. Specifically, it is argued that underdemocratized political systems and patronage-oriented party systems dampen the cause of generous social spending and the impact of those struggling for it. State actors, left-party regimes, and social movements spur social policy, but only under favorable institutional conditions. To appraise this theory, key Senate roll-call votes on WPA wage rates are examined, as well as state-level variations in WPA wages at the end of the 1930s. The analyses, which include multiple regression and qualitative comparative analysis, support the theory

Recognizing medicalization and demedicalization: Discourses, practices, and identities

Scholars of the medicalization of social problems have paid inadequate attention to medicalization’s multiple dimensions – discourses, practices and identities – and to the multiple levels of analysis at which it occurs – macro, meso and micro. As a result, scholars of a given social problem typically examine only a few aspects of its medicalization, fail to recognize changes in medicalization, and miss occasions where medicalization and demedicalization occur simultaneously. Moreover, by conceptualizing medicalization as a category or state rather than a continuous value, and failing to specify the threshold at which a phenomenon becomes ‘medicalized’ or ‘demedicalized’, scholars have discouraged attention to demedicalization. The article provides a new typology of medicalization and illustrates its utility through an analysis of two episodes in American abortion history. Previous analysts of these episodes miss many aspects of medicalization and disagree about whether these episodes involve medicalization or demedicalization. The typology helps resolve these differences.

The Biomedical Legacy in Minority Health Policy-Making, 1975–2002

Through content analysis, the study traces the relative prominence of “biomedical” and “public health” approaches in congressional bills aimed at improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities over a 28-year period. It documents a surge of interest in minority health during the late 1980s and early 1990s and highlights the dominance of biomedical initiatives during this period. Drawing on historical methods and interviews with key informants, the paper explains these patterns by detailing the ways in which policy legacies shaped the interests, opportunities, and ideas of interest groups and policy-makers.

The Unborn and the Undead

Rights and rhetoric clash in abortion politics, with Susan Markens, Katrina Kimport, Drew Halfmann, Kimala Price, and Deana A. Rohlinger.