Racial Insurgency, the State, and Welfare Expansion: Local and National Level Evidence from the Postwar United States

Abstract

This paper addresses systematically the possible nexus between insurgent political action and the state apparatus, concentrating specifically on the relationship between urban riots and welfare or reliefgiving activity in the postwar United States. The theoretical warrant for the analysis has its genesis in Piven and Cloward's influential thesis relating insurgency and relief giving in capitalist society. This perspective is juxtaposed with the orthodox developmental perspective of welfare institutions, and the causal processes and underlying images of the state are compared. A critical review of the empirical work on the riot-welfare relationship suggests several deficiencies and questions which we attempt to redress and address, respectively, in a cross-level empirical analysis of (a) changes in welfare expenditures from 1960 to 1970 in a panel of U.S. cities and (b) annual changes in national aggretate relief-program categories for the postwar United States (1947-76). The results of the city-level analysis, parallel to several similar studies, provide extremely weak to no support for the hypothesized riot-welfare relationship. However, the postwar timeseries analysis provides consistently strong evidence that the urban riots played an important role nationally in the short-term expansion of the extent of relief giving across several major program categories. The conclusion considers the implications of the findings for theories of (a) welfare institutions in late capitalism, (b) the state in late capitalism, and (c) collective action and insurgency.