Jerry L. Mashaw
Jennifer L. Erkulwater has a particularly fine understanding of the interplay among congressional, bureaucratic, and judicial politics in the creation of modern social welfare programs. Her story of the expansion of disability rights weaves these threads together in a way that has not been done before.
Ruth O'Brien
This book studies the evolution of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Supplemental Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), significant programs since so many people live in poverty in the United States and other forms of programmatic support for such individuals have dwindled. Jennifer L. Erkulwater investigates policy innovation and asks why the programs have been so consistently strong despite other cutbacks in aid to the poor.
Thomas F. Burke
The book fills a huge void. Disability benefit programs are a large and growing segment of the American welfare state, yet this is the first book about the politics of these programs since the 1980s—a tumultuous period for both SSI and SSDI. As Jennifer L. Erkulwater shows, politicians and the public have only sporadically concerned themselves with the enormous problems these programs encounter, but that's no excuse for political scientists, who have largely ignored a key aspect of American welfare policy, one that affects all the others. As Erkulwater convincingly demonstrates, the disability-rights movement, for all its successes, has had little impact on disability welfare programs, which continue to operate under older understandings of disability. Thus Erkulwater's book tells a poignant story both about welfare state entrenchment and the limits of rights movements. This well-written, perceptive book is a worthy successor to the grand tradition of Social Security disability scholarship.