Students of social policy have often been told that social policy is concerned with the ways in which societies organise their resources to meet basic human needs. This has often led to a particular focus on the provision of core benefits and services, such as social security, health and social care, housing and – often – education (see e.g. Spicker, Reference Spicker2014: 1). However, as Elisabeth Anderson argues, social policy is also concerned with issues of regulation. She focuses on the origins and development of child labour laws in Prussia, France, Belgium and parts of the United States to examine the roles played by elite and middle class ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in the development of these Acts.
Anderson outlines a number of frameworks which have been used to explain the origins and growth of welfare states, including arguments about the impact of industrialisation, power resources, ‘states as actors’, and historical institutionalism. She argues that an important limitation of all these approaches is their inability to provide convincing explanations for the failure to develop child labour laws in countries with very similar structural characteristics, or to explain variations in the form of such laws. This is why she believes it is essential to pay more attention to the role of individual ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and to the strategies they followed in pursuit of the objectives they sought.
Not with standing this focus, Anderson is anxious to avoid any suggestion that this marks a reversion to a ‘great man’ (or ‘great woman’) account of policy development (see e.g. p. 7). By comparing examples of successful and unsuccessful ‘policy entrepreneurship’, she also seeks to identify the circumstances which enabled different entrepreneurs to achieve their goals and the strategies they pursued in doing so. She highlights the significance of the positions which different actors occupied in relation to their ‘fields’ together with the particular importance of the frames they used when presenting their arguments, their ability to build supportive alliances, and their willingness to compromise. She concludes that, in addition to their historical importance, these factors are also highly relevant to the fractured and partisan world of the present-day United States.
These arguments are pursued through a series of well-researched and tightly-argued case studies. In Part I, Anderson examines the initial development of child labour laws in Prussia, France, Belgium and Massachusetts during the 1830s and 1840s. In the case of Prussia, the initial push for legislation was led by two contrasting figures – the ‘enlightened and thoughtful, but mild-mannered, reclusive and indecisive’ Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, and the more pragmatic liberal aristocrat, Ernst von Bodelschwingh. She argues that Bodelschwingh succeeded where Altenstein failed because he was able to mediate between different tiers of government, understood the need to frame his arguments in terms which were more likely to appeal to potential opponents, and showed a greater willingness to compromise. In the following chapter, she argues that similar factors explain the difference between the successful outcome of Charles Dupin’s reformist efforts in France and the unsuccessful efforts of his counterpart, Édouard Ducpétiaux, in Belgium. She then crosses the Atlantic to examine the origins of child labour laws in Massachusetts. She argues that the role of policy entrepreneurs was less important here, but only because there was already a (near-) universal consensus in favour of reform by the time the measure was introduced.
As Anderson acknowledges, legislation is only likely to be effective if it is backed up by appropriate enforcement mechanisms. In the second part of her book, she explores the establishment of factory inspectorates in both Germany and different parts of the United States between 1877 and 1893. In both cases, she argues that the role of policy entrepreneurs remained important, even though their efforts were underpinned by the support of increasingly powerful labour movements. In Germany, she highlights the particular contribution of the reformist civil servant, Theodor Lohmann, and his often ‘creative’ attempts to circumvent the peculiar animosity to factory inspection demonstrated by the Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. In the case of Massachusetts, she contrasts the unsuccessful efforts made by a series of state officials, including Henry Oliver, George McNeill and Carroll D. Wright, with the more effective strategy of the newly-appointed police chief, Rufus Wade. In Illinois, efforts to establish a factory inspectorate were spearheaded by two female reformers – Elizabeth Morgan and Florence Kelley. Morgan was a labour activist who appears to have relied on more anecdotal and impressionistic accounts of workplace abuse and was antagonistic towards potential middle-class allies. Anderson argues that Kelley’s contribution was more effective because she enjoyed a much closer relationship with leading middle-class philanthropists and was able to frame her arguments in the more acceptable language of quantitative social science.
Although Anderson is anxious to highlight the positive contributions of her more successful entrepreneurs, it is also appropriate to acknowledge their limitations. As we have already seen, successful legislation does not enforce itself and all of the early attempts at child labour reform which have been highlighted in this book appear to have been hampered, if not undermined, by the absence of effective inspection regimes. This was particularly true in Massachusetts, where the author suggests that many industrialists may have declined to oppose progressive legislation because they expected it to be ineffective (p. 139). This was also why the later struggles to establish factory inspectorates, which also relied more heavily on labour support, were so important.
It is also worth asking how far Anderson’s emphasis on the role played by policy entrepreneurs in the genesis of child labour legislation is applicable to later welfare state developments. As Elisabeth Clemens noted on the book’s back cover, this study focuses on the origins of welfare legislation ‘within political architectures which were not quite modern’, and this raises an important question about the extent to which similar roles continued to be important in later years when other reforms – such as the introduction of social insurance provisions – became more prominent. However, even if Anderson may have exaggerated the importance of policy entrepreneurs in shaping the long-term history of welfare states, she is surely right, firstly to emphasise the importance of labour laws as part of the ‘regulatory welfare state’ and, secondly, in highlighting the significance of the contributions made by particular individuals in shaping policy agendas and bringing reforms to fruition.
