The U.S. welfare state as we know it is shot through with paradoxes. It is a vast bureaucratic apparatus, yet it hides in plain sight, such that many of its beneficiaries are unaware that they are recipients of government assistance. It is a public entity, but often delivers its services through private organizations. Scholars have come up with an elaborate lexicon to refer to the resulting structure, calling it a “divided,” “fragmented,” “submerged,” “shadow,” or even a “Rube Goldberg” welfare state. Whatever we call it, the distinctive structure of the U.S. welfare state has had important consequences for the well-being of its recipients, as well as for the shape of U.S. politics more broadly.

These two books explore the deep roots underlying the U.S. welfare state we know today. Taken together, they offer important insights into why the U.S. welfare state looks the way it does, and how it does—and does not—work for those it is ostensibly designed to help.

Cybelle Fox’s Three Worlds of Relief offers a rich and detailed account of the development of poor relief and citizenship in the early twentieth century. Looking at the interaction between federal, state, and local relief agencies, Fox seeks to understand how these systems did or did not extend social citizenship to recipients, thus incorporating or excluding marginal communities. She discovers widely disparate treatment of white European immigrants, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and Blacks, the eponymous “three worlds” of relief: Europeans were included, Blacks were excluded, and Mexicans, after a period of uncertainty, were excluded—and often expelled.

In each case, these worlds were shaped by the interactions between the structure of labor markets, racial dynamics, and political context. European immigrants largely settled in political machine-run cities in the North and Midwest, where they worked in skilled and unskilled manufacturing. While they were non-citizens, their perceived whiteness made them assimilable into the existing racial hierarchy. Politicians eager to cultivate new sources of electoral support, and social workers seeking to incorporate them into their new society, actively reached out to European immigrants to ensure that they received full benefits and could become naturalized citizens if they wanted. Blacks were mainly confined to the South, where they were limited to work as sharecroppers or domestic servants. While nominally citizens, the racial hierarchy dominated by Southern planters kept them politically disenfranchised and largely excluded from relief programs. As for Mexicans, they were concentrated in the Southwest, where they provided a welcome steady supply of labor for growers, working under a migratory labor system very different from the sharecropping system in the South. Their combination of perceived racial difference and often-questionable citizenship status marked them as “alien” and therefore unassimilable. Meanwhile, Progressive governance structures that reduced opportunities for patronage-based constituency development, and social workers who developed the idea of “indolent” Mexican workers dependent on relief, limited efforts to incorporate them into the community as full citizens. Instead, relief managers often teamed up with immigration officials to deport and otherwise exclude Mexicans. Their efforts often ended up hurting Mexican-Americans, who were tarred with the same racialized brush as their non-citizen counterparts.

Kimberly J. Morgan and Andrea Louise Campbell’s book seeks to understand why publicly-funded U.S. social policies are so often administered and delivered by non-state actors, a phenomenon they term the “delegated welfare state.” Their case study is the development of health care policy from the postwar period to the present, with a specific focus on the passage and implementation of Medicare Part D in 2003. Some might view the tendency to delegate public social programs to private entities to be a relatively recent development, as embodied most recently in Obamacare, but Morgan and Campbell argue that it is a characteristic feature of the U.S. welfare state going back to its origins. The key difference between earlier and later versions of the delegated welfare state lies in an increasing effort to include market mechanisms and for-profit actors in the administration of state benefits.

Where does this drive to delegate come from? While some might view it as a function of a characteristically “weak” U.S. state, Morgan and Campbell argue that it is the imperfect solution to a thorny political problem that U.S. policymakers face—how to provide government benefits without appearing to increase the size of government? This tension arises from three interrelated factors: first, the contradictory nature of public opinion, which demands both more social programs and smaller government; second, the powerful role of interest groups, which seek to limit government provision while expanding their own role in service delivery; and third, the expansive role of Congress in policymaking, which requires building broad political coalitions with competing interests in order to enact new legislation. The resulting policies may be politically expedient, but the authors show that this is often at the expense of program effectiveness.

Readers will recognize in both of these books strong continuities over time in the structures of U.S. social policy, as well as the debates surrounding them. Echoing Morgan and Campbell’s argument about health care, Fox shows that relief provision was done through a mix of public and private agencies from early on, as charities coordinated their activities with federal, state, and local governments. As with health care, this led to variable outcomes and problems with monitoring and oversight, some of which were partially remedied as the New Deal brought greater federal intervention. We also see in both cases a recurring effort among policymakers, experts, and service providers to distinguish between “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients. Fox shows how perceptions of “indolent” Mexicans in the Southwest created a sense that relief payments were being misspent to support an undeserving population, while also illegitimately subsidizing the agricultural industry. Meanwhile, relief was considered an essential part of assimilating “industrious” European immigrants and helping them along the path to full integration into U.S. society. In both cases, social workers played a key role in shaping those different perceptions. Morgan and Campbell show that it was only the most “deserving” populations, such as veterans and the elderly, who were able to obtain universal, directly administered benefits, such as the Veteran’s Administration and Social Security. Other efforts to expand social benefits were ensnared in the political dynamics that lead to the delegated welfare state.

Both books highlight the central role of political institutions in shaping social policy. In Fox’s case, it is federalism that allows for regional variation in relief provision, which is what allows the different political, economic, and racial contexts in the North, South, and Southwest to have the effects they do. In Morgan and Campbell’s case, it is the fact that Congress plays such a central role as a policymaking body that makes it consequential that its multiple veto points create huge obstacles to new policies, while also creating multiple entry points where interest groups can exert leverage.

Three Worlds of Relief shines in its careful documentation of regional differences in welfare provision, and how those were tied to conceptions of race and citizenship. Fox is especially adept at showing how politics and policies are deeply intertwined with the socio-economic dynamics at work in each region. By comparison, The Delegated Welfare State offers a far more restrictive analysis of state-society relations. In Morgan and Campbell’s account, politicians are trying to reconcile the contradictory messages they receive from individual voters as expressed in polling data. Interest groups also pull politicians in different directions, while institutional hurdles push them to compromise in search of broad coalitions. While they are considerably less sanguine about the policy outcomes of this process, what they describe is entirely consistent with a traditional pluralist view of politics: Competing interests collide, nobody gets everything they want, and politics muddles along towards the middle.

But as generations of critics of pluralism going back to E. E. Schattschneider have argued, taking the existing set of players for granted ignores how the sets of players have changed over time, not to mention how the size and shape of the field has changed. Overlooking these key changes can make politics seem like it continues to move towards “the middle,” even as that middle shifts dramatically. This is most apparent in Morgan and Campbell’s discussion of interest groups’ influence on policymaking. Interest groups certainly matter in their account, although the authors rightly reject crudely instrumentalist views of interest groups as “puppet masters,” and they caution against taking an overly uniform view of interest group demands. But what is entirely missing from their analysis is any consideration of how the population of interest groups, i.e. which groups are or are not considered “relevant,” has dramatic consequences for policy outcomes. Thus, the authors unquestioningly accept that the universe of “medical” interest groups comprises hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and the AARP. But even if we grant that these groups have competing interests, and even if we accept that the AARP serves as a staunch defender of patient interests, it is not unreasonable to assume that an interest group population made up almost entirely of industry lobbyists will tend to favor policies that benefit industry, and that patients’ interests will tend to get short shrift. Morgan and Campbell’s careful analysis of competition among interest groups is accurate on the surface, but misses the larger story of whose voices are missing or marginalized in the health care debate. This dynamic, not simply the fact of delegation per se, may better explain why delegated programs end up being implemented, even though they are demonstrably less effective than more directly-administered programs.

Just as ignoring the broader political context leads Morgan and Campbell to downplay the importance of interest group influence, so too does it lead them to oversell the power of public opinion. One of the central claims throughout the book is that the delegated welfare state results from a public opinion paradox: Americans like specific public services, but dislike government in general. But public opinion is often contradictory and subject to interpretation. It is organizations that give coherence to public opinion, push certain issues onto the political agenda, and shape the range of “viable” policy options. Even if we grant that some vague force of public opinion pushes politicians to “do something” about health care policy, Morgan and Campbell’s own study shows that understanding the form and content of what actually gets done is less a story of politicians “squaring the circle” of public opinion than it is a story of politicians listening to the loudest, most familiar interest group voices, and negotiating between those positions established as being within the “acceptable” range of options.

These criticisms aside, Morgan and Campbell’s book makes a bold intervention into ongoing debates about the structure and development of the U.S. welfare state. By contrast, in paying close attention to the nuances and complexities of her cases, Fox shies away from drawing out the broader implications of her work. To be sure, her narrative does grapple with several interesting questions along the way: Why was citizenship sometimes a requirement for relief, and sometimes not? Were European immigrants really as self-sustaining as traditional accounts claim? Why did perceptions of Black welfare dependency change? But these are all answered as steps towards a broader argument that is never fully articulated. Fox certainly carefully documents that European immigrants, Blacks, and people of Mexican ancestry experienced state relief systems very differently, and that this resulted from differences in labor markets, political context, and racial hierarchies. She does sometimes hint at how this conceptualization of relief systems challenges existing understandings of the early U.S. welfare state, and how her findings advance our understanding. But such analysis remains buried within the narrative, leaving readers to piece a broader argument together for themselves. Given the impressive amount of research involved in this project, Fox is well positioned to speak to these issues, and a more extensive discussion of the book’s wider implications would have strengthened it considerably.

Scholars interested in the ongoing reassessment of the U.S. welfare state will find plenty of interest in both of these books. Each moves us beyond existing conceptions of the “weak” or “laissez-faire” U.S. state. Instead, they reveal a very active and involved state, albeit one that exercises its power in convoluted and unexpected ways. Explaining why this is the case remains the central challenge for scholars of U.S. policy and politics, and these two works are welcome contributions to that discussion.