Ideas and the Welfare State

Abstract

This article examines the legacy of American and Canadian welfare state development to explain surprisingly comparable levels of child care provision. It highlights the ironies of policy history while demonstrating the importance of ideas as independent causal factors in the development of public policies and the effect of their institutionalization on future policy development. Maternalist, nativist, and eugencist imperatives led U.S. governments to intrude in areas normally considered part of the private sphere and led to the adoption of policies to respond to a perceived decline primarily of the White population. These policies provided a normative and institutional basis for future government involvement in child care funding and programs, even after the conditions that led to the original policies changed. In Canada, the lack of large-scale entrenchment of similar ideas constrained an otherwise more interventionist government and made it more difficult for child care policies to find governmental and societal acceptance.