Who Voted with Hopkins? Institutional Politics and the WPA

Scholars of the politics of public social policy have engaged in contentious debates over “institutional” and “political” theories. Institutional theories hold that U.S. social policy is inhibited by fragmented political institutions and weak executive state organizations. Political theories hold that the United States lacks a left-wing political party and a strong labor movement to push for social policy. Both theories are thus pessimistic about and cannot account for advances in U.S. social policy.