Politics and jobs: the boundaries of employment policy in the United States

Abstract

Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the USA? To answer this question, Margaret Weir highlights two related elements: the power of ideas in policy-making and the politics of interest formation. Rather than seeing policy as a straightforward outcome of public preferences, she shows how ideas frame problems and how interests form around possibilities created by the interplay of ideas and politics. By examining Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the 1930s and 1940s, labour market policies in the 1960s and 1970s, and efforts to develop new planning mechanisms in the late 1970s, Weir shows how early decisions restricted the scope for later initiatives. As a result, policies in the 1960s emphasized racial differences and thus drew opposition for creating special interest measures for Afro-Americans.