The Uneasy Relationship: Democracy, Taxation, and State-Building Since the New Deal

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian E. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
Income Taxes ◽  
Fiscal Restraint ◽  
History Of ◽  
Federal Taxation ◽  
Insurance Tax ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter explores the relationships between democracy, taxation, and state-building in the post-New Deal period. It discusses the tension that has existed between state-building and national resistance to federal taxation and how democracy has come to be at odds with state-building as it comes into conflict with strong anti-tax sentiment. It considers how politicians have struggled to find ways to work around the limitations imposed by the urgency of raising revenue and shows that fiscal restraint has not been an insurmountable barrier. In particular, it examines the emergence of mass income taxes and social-insurance tax systems as well as the substantial state presence achieved in all areas of life, including social welfare and highway construction. The chapter explains how the history of taxation offers insights into the areas in which public policy, institutional development, and political culture intersected.

The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression. By Jeff Singleton. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 243. $72.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 290-291
Author(s):  
Robert K. Fleck
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Public Employment ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The Welfare State

In this book, Jeff Singleton provides a detailed history of relief programs prior to and during the Great Depression. He also assesses the obstacles to welfare reform since the 1930s, and he generally argues for more reliance on social insurance and public employment as alternatives to means-tested welfare programs. The book will be of interest to scholars seeking to understand the details and evolution of relief institutions before and during the New Deal, as well as to those interested in the historical origins of modern policy.

State-building and the European Union: Markets, War, and Europe's Uneven Political Development

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402110473
Author(s):  
R. Daniel Kelemen ◽  
Kathleen R. McNamara
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Eu Governance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Eu

The European Union’s institutional development is highly imbalanced. It has established robust legal authority and institutions, but it remains weak or impotent in terms of its centralization of fiscal, administrative, and coercive capacity. We argue that situating the EU in terms of the history of state-building allows us to better understand the outcomes of EU governance. Historically, political projects centralizing power have been most complete when both market and security pressures are present to generate state formation. With the EU, market forces have had a far greater influence than immediate military threats. We offer a preliminary demonstration of the promise of this approach by applying it to two empirical examples, the euro and the Schengen area. Our analysis suggests that the EU does not need to be a Weberian state, nor be destined to become one, for the state-building perspective to shed new light on its processes of political development.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Central Objective ◽  
Familial Influences ◽  
The New Deal

This introduction lays out the book’s central objective: to explore why Americans returned to the Civil War throughout the New Deal years. The Civil War offered a prism for exploring the emotional upheaval people experienced in light of the Depression; the political debates that swirled around the state-building initiatives of the New Deal; and struggles over race and civil rights. Also explored here is the evolution of this book, including personal and familial influences on the author.

State-Building Amidst Conflict

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Najum Mushtaq
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
State Formation ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
State Building ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Member States ◽  
South Central ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter discusses the correlation between bottom-up local reconciliation and state-building in Somalia. It identifies key conflict actors in three regional states, and postulates general trends in local conflicts and how to address them. Rather than promoting grassroots reconciliation between various sets of clans engaged in localized conflicts throughout south-central Somalia, the process of forming Federal Member States has intensified and, in some cases, revived conflicts over regional boundaries, land use, and political representation. The urgency to meet the New Deal benchmarks has led to what independent observers consider to be contentious and hasty state-formation. The 2013–17 period was marred by a surge in clan-based violence as discontent grew among those clans that felt they received an unfair deal.

A Short History of the New Deal

1935 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 585
Author(s):  
Harold U. Faulkner ◽  
Louis M. Hacker ◽  
Guy S. Claire
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Short History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The New Deal

Sensing Food in the New Deal Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Food Writing

This introductory chapter examines taste as a symbolic, cultural, affective, and as economic currency always in circulation, and that, once mobilized, allows eaters to identify and differentiate themselves along race, class, gender, and ethnic lines. The concept of sensory economies is a plural one and allows exploring sensory experiences of food as the result of social, cultural, and financial exchanges always remade. The chapter looks at the cultural, social, and sensory history of New Deal food writing: the multisensory culinary material produced by employees of the Federal Writers's Project (FWP). Throughout, workers produced comforting snapshot pictures aimed at providing cultural confidence to a country in the midst of one of the worst economic depression of its history and giving legitimacy to the new political, social, and economic order of the liberal New Deal state.

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