Policy Entrepreneurs and the Origins of the Regulatory Welfare State: Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Industrial child labor laws were the earliest manifestation of the modern regulatory welfare state. Why, despite the absence of political pressure from below, did some states (but not others) succeed in legislating working hours, minimum ages, and schooling requirements for working children in the first half of the nineteenth century? I use case studies of the politics behind the first child labor laws in Germany and France, alongside a case study of a failed child labor reform effort in Belgium, to answer this question. I show that existing structural, class-based, and institutional theories of the welfare state are insufficient to explain why child labor laws came about. Highlighting instead the previously neglected role of elite policy entrepreneurs, I argue that the success or failure of early nineteenth-century child labor laws depended on these actors’ social skill, pragmatic creativity, and goal-directedness. At the same time, their actions and influence were conditioned by their field position and the architecture of the policy field. By specifying the qualities and conditions that enable policy entrepreneurs to build the alliances needed to effect policy change, this analysis lends precision to the general claim that their agency matters.

“Child Neglect:”

Besides “identity loan,” another important illicit subsistence strategy crucial to farmworkers’ survival is relying upon child labor. While many sources have documented the perils of children working in agriculture, few have examined the fact that children must assume others’ identities in order to be hired. Because child labor laws make it illegal for teens to work more than 60 hours a week, no employer will hire a teen “on the books.” Teens, then, routinely disguise themselves as adults in order to work the summer harvest to supplement their parents’ limited incomes. Yet teens’ working loaned identities propels them into a “space of nonexistence” when they are injured, preventing them from receiving the care they need. Indeed, teens’ work in the fields in fact incriminates both their employers and their parents, leading to their or their parents’ denounce-ability, untreated illness, and sometimes death.

Lenroot, Katharine Fredrica

Katharine Fredrica Lenroot (1891–1982), praised for her contributions to child welfare, juvenile delinquency, and child labor laws, worked at the U.S. Children's Bureau for 37 years. She became its chief in 1934 and represented the United States at UNICEF.