Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State is a modern classic. For two decades, Pierson’s theoretically innovative and empirically grounded account of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations’ retrenchment efforts has provided the intellectual foundation for the study of the politics of the welfare state after the golden age. The winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy, Dismantling the Welfare State has been cited some 3,500 times in Google Scholar and remains essential reading for scholars of comparative politics, American politics, and policy studies.

There are at least three reasons why the book has had such a large influence on scholarship. First, it offered a sophisticated, fine-grained analysis of a political development of enormous importance to millions of people living in advanced democracies: the attempt of conservative politicians to curb social expenditure during the 1980s. Rather than simply providing a bottom-line assessment of the impact of the retrenchment project, the book offered a nuanced explanation for why some programs proved to be far more resilient than others. Many of Pierson’s findings challenged conventional wisdom, for example, the belief that universal programs are always and everywhere more durable than means-tested programs targeted at the poor.

Second, Pierson offered an elegant framework for conceptualizing and measuring retrenchment. He stressed the need to distinguish between systemic and programmatic retrenchment, between outcomes over the short and long run, and between welfare state structure and size.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the book creatively synthesized insights from both historical institutionalism and rational choice theory. The book gave close attention not only to the broad influence of formal institutions and governmental capacities, but also to the strategic behavior of reelection-minded politicians seeking to avoid blame for unpopular cuts in social benefits (Arnold Reference Arnold1990; Weaver Reference Weaver1988). Indeed, perhaps the book’s most powerful analytic move was to demonstrate that a study of policy feedback in the welfare state requires attention not only to how elite bureaucrats develop new policies in response to the experience of old ones, but also to how the resources and information distributed by previous policies create new interests well-positioned to resist cutbacks. This increasing returns dynamic—which Pierson would explore more fully in his landmark work on path dependence (Pierson Reference Pierson2004)—prevented an erosion in the welfare state’s political position despite the decline of its key traditional constituency, organized labor.

This is a fitting moment to take a fresh look at Pierson's analysis. A great deal has changed during the past two decades: income inequality has widened, partisan polarization has intensified, and economic insecurity has increased for people on both sides of the Atlantic (Bartels Reference Bartels2008; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2010). Yet at the same time, the major US entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) continue to generate tremendous support among both beneficiaries and officeholders (Campbell Reference Campbell2003). Scholarship on the politics of domestic policymaking has also evolved in key respects. There is growing attention to the importance of hidden or submerged programs (Howard Reference Howard1999; Mettler Reference Mettler2011), to market reforms of public programs (Morgan and Campbell Reference Morgan and Campbell2011), to long-term processes of policy development (Patashnik Reference Patashnik2008), and to the subtle ways that outcomes can change without formal action, such as through policy drift (Hacker Reference Hacker2004; Thelen and Streeck Reference Thelen and Streeck2005). Thus, this symposium offers an opportunity not only to celebrate the scholarly contributions of a seminal book, but also to take stock of how the book's arguments illuminate current trends in public policy.

The other articles in this symposium offer a variety of perspectives on the contributions of Dismantling. Suzanne Mettler’s essay reminds us how novel Pierson’s book was when it was published. While Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol (Weir and Skocpol 1985; Skocpol Reference Skocpol1992) had developed the key claim that policies, once adopted, shape subsequent political dynamics through policy feedback effects, Pierson significantly advanced the research frontier by proposing specific causal mechanisms through which such feedback dynamics might operate. As Mettler observes, this analytic move enabled Pierson to trace policy development over time, exploring how institutional arrangements interacted with specific features of policy design to shape opportunities for retrenchment. While scholars still have much to learn about policy feedback and policy development, Mettler argues that Pierson’s pathbreaking work anticipated many of the questions that are the focus of contemporary scholarship.

John D. Stephens systematically evaluates how well Pierson’s central empirical claims have held up over time. Drawing on a data analysis (conducted with Evelyn Huber) of three key transfer programs—pensions, sickness pay, and unemployment compensation—Stephens finds that Pierson’s central claim two decades ago that partisan government is much less important for welfare state outcomes in an era of retrenchment remains valid. Stephens’s analysis further shows that Pierson’s other major empirical propositions have (with only a few exceptions) also stood the test of time, underscoring that the book offers important substantive insights into the politics of social provision in the twenty-first century.

In their essays, Jane Gingrich and Andrea Louise Campbell offer some friendly amendments to Pierson’s core arguments. Gingrich argues that while the “new politics of the welfare state” which Dismantling describes are still with us, allowing social programs to survive without strong labor movements, it does not follow that the strength of a nation’s labor unions or the power resources of its left parties are of no consequence. According to Gingrich, the level of inequality that a nation experiences is shaped by the interactions among its programmatic structures, political institutions, and broader political and economic contexts. Campbell strikes a similar note, arguing that retrenchment advocates have often succeeded in blocking the updating needed for social programs to continue to protect citizens from life’s vagaries (see Hacker Reference Hacker2004).

Peter Hall, while praising Dismantling for offering penetrating insights into why continuity is a key feature of social policy, directs attention to long-running shifts in welfare states and the politics surrounding them since the 1980s. Hall notes that “welfare” has been replaced by “workfare” in both the United States and Britain and that the rhetoric of social policy making is suffused more deeply with neoliberal values today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Political discourse now emphasizes market efficiency rather than social justice. Hall suggests that these profound changes in the climate of social policy making are the result of long-term ideational processes that have shifted the entire political spectrum to the right.

In his concluding reflections, Paul Pierson discusses how his own thinking about the core concepts of the book has evolved during the past two decades, in large part in response to the research of other scholars. Pierson argues that research has firmly established the importance of studying policy feedback as a major determinant of political development in an era of activist government, alongside formal political institutions. Pierson notes that a second core idea of the book is that of visibility: policies vary not only in how they distribute costs and benefits, but also in how visible these policy effects are to different groups. This idea did not initially gain much traction in the literature, but over time the importance of visibility has received increasing attention. Scholars have begun to study how strategic politicians can manipulate policy design so that voters see only the things that they want them to see while masking other policy effects, thereby increasing politicians’ freedom of action. Finally, Pierson argues that he would be a little more critical of Dismantling than the contributors to the symposium have been with respect to the book’s analysis of how political power is exercised in democratic politics. While Dismantling recognized that governing for the long-term means protecting your own coalition and trying to cause trouble for rival ones, the book paid insufficient attention to the organized actors, including business groups, who recruit, monitor, and discipline politicians. It also did not fully explore how profound shifts in the socioeconomic context can undermine the resilience of the welfare state even when statutory commitments remain stable. These are, to be sure, important limitations, which the research of many scholars, including Pierson himself, is working to overcome. It is a testament to the enduring power of Dismantling that its core arguments continue to shape scholarly agendas long after the political actors whose actions the book analyzed have exited the stage.