SOCIAL POLICY AND CAPITAL ACCUMULATION: AN ECONOMETRIC STUDY OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF SOCIAL WELFARE LEGISLATION

This dissertation examines the general hypothesis that within capitalist social formations, institutions of social policy help to regulate the process of capital accumulation by alternately reproducing social discipline and social security. These alternations are hypothesized to result from a structured set of contradictory requirements--discipline and security--imposed upon social policy by the process of accumulation itself.;It is found in the econometric testing that social policy in the postwar United States has also followed alternations of discipline and security. Expenditures on Unemployment Insurance (UI) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) are the major dependent variables. It is found that (a) a general strategy of security underlies the structure of the UI program in the postwar period; (b) the usefulness of this strategy reaches a peak in the mid-1970's and becomes problematic thereafter; (c) the strategy embodied in the trend is refined, throughout the period, as the needs of capital accumulation are modified by the business cycle (i.e., we see alternations of discipline and security within the general trend of security); (d) the use of the strategy over each cycle is somewhat dependent on the success of the strategy (in supporting profitability) in the previous cycle; and (e) security is fought for and can be won by workers who, for one reason or another, feel themselves to be sinking below some expected standard of living.;The dramatic growth of AFDC per capita in the politically explosive period, 1967-1973, suggests that the regulation of secondary workers is extremely responsive to events which arise outside of the sphere of the economy, and that AFDC serves, in part, to maintain a stable reserve population which can move into and out of the labor force. It is found that the recipients of AFDC are secondary workers who need to be both disciplined and secure even when not in the labor force.;The general hypothesis is subjected to an informal historical test and to a formal econometric test. It is found in the historical investigation that the early stages of capitalist development in England were regulated, in part, by the irregular alternations of a disciplinary and a security-oriented social policy.