In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

Machine generated contents note: 1 Welfare Reform: An Agenda for Reauthorization -- Ron Haskins and Rebecca M. Blank -- Part II: The Biggest Issues -- 2 Implementation of the Personal Responsibility -- Act of 1996 -- Thomas L. Gais, Richard P? Nathan, Irene Lurie, -- and Thomas Kaplan --...

Between 1970 and the early 2000s, there was a revolution in support for the use of field experiments to evaluate social programs. Focusing on the welfare reform studies that helped to speed that transformation in the United States, this chapter describes the major challenges to implementing...