Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net

The recent history of the American welfare state has been viewed with dismay by those on the left because of the steady contraction of benefits under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In contrast, Jennifer L. Erkulwater describes the remarkable success of advocacy for the disabled at a time when the federal government was seemingly impervious to liberal policy innovations.Since the War on Poverty the American public's support for social-welfare policies has gradually eroded as conservative politicians have gained power and demographic changes and uncertain economic growth have enhanced pressures for fiscal retrenchment. Yet, the past thirty years have also seen a dramatic expansion of disability benefits. This book is the first to examine how entitlements for the disabled have fared in the wake of the disability-rights movement. This movement initially fought to end the institutionalization of the severely disabled and moved on to claim that antidiscrimination laws would allow the disabled to work and become less dependent on welfare. It also had a profound impact on entitlements.Erkulwater demonstrates that the Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs enacted between 1972 and 2000 succeeded because policy elites switched from welfare-based approaches to the civil-rights rhetoric used by the disability-rights movement. The work of liberal advocates who sought to end the segregation of the disabled in custodial institutions and integrate them into their home communities contributed to the growth of programs providing financial assistance to disabled citizens and to the recent controversies surrounding the future direction of disability policy.

"Jennifer L. Erkulwater has a particularly fine understanding of the interplay among congressional, bureaucratic, and judicial politics in the creation of modern social welfare programs. Her story of the expansion of disability rights weaves these threads together in a way that has not been done before.", "The book fills a huge void. Disability benefit programs are a large and growing segment of the American welfare state, yet this is the first book about the politics of these programs since the 1980s—a tumultuous period for both SSI and SSDI. As Jennifer L. Erkulwater shows, politicians and the public have only sporadically concerned themselves with the enormous problems these programs encounter, but that's no excuse for political scientists, who have largely ignored a key aspect of American welfare policy, one that affects all the others. As Erkulwater convincingly demonstrates, the disability-rights movement, for all its successes, has had little impact on disability welfare programs, which continue to operate under older understandings of disability. Thus Erkulwater's book tells a poignant story both about welfare state entrenchment and the limits of rights movements. This well-written, perceptive book is a worthy successor to the grand tradition of Social Security disability scholarship.", "This book studies the evolution of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Supplemental Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), significant programs since so many people live in poverty in the United States and other forms of programmatic support for such individuals have dwindled. Jennifer L. Erkulwater investigates policy innovation and asks why the programs have been so consistently strong despite other cutbacks in aid to the poor."

Jennifer L. Erkulwater is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond. She was the winner of the 2002 Heinz Award given by the National Academy of Social Insurance.