Overview

The practice of delegating roles in social service provision to nonprofit organizations, often referred to as privatization, is a striking feature of the evolution of Western welfare states in the past few decades. ""The Welfare State's Other Crisis"" proposes an explanation of that trend based on an examination of the case of France. While most observers of the international trend toward increasing delegation to nonprofit organizations have equated it with a conservative assault on the welfare state, Claire Ullman demonstrates that this was not the case in France. There, delegation to nonprofits was principally advocated by three intertwined groups of political elites motivated by the desire to increase the ability of the state to achieve progressive social goals, including enabling welfare programs to reach more of the disadvantaged. These elites sought to recruit nonprofit organizations as partners of the state not to roll back the state, but to bolster and extend its power.To support her argument, Ullman recounts the increasing involvement of non-profit organizations in the implementation of a variety of different welfare policies under the direction of France's socialist government in the 1980s. She finds that every major poverty policy of this administration relied on nonprofits for its implementation, including a campaign against hunger and homelessness, a law implementing a national right to housing and major legislation creating a guaranteed minimum income. Ullman's study suggests that the western welfare state's new reliance on nonprofit organizations be re-evaluated in light of the French case.Policy makers throughout the west have realized that there are some tasks which public agencies seem unable to accomplish without the help of partners in society, and they have turned to nonprofit organizations for help. The new partnership does not necessarily diminish public responsibility for social welfare programs, but it does have important implications for the functioning of the welfare state and even for democracy.

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Claire F. Ullman received a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1995. She has taught at Barnard College and the Wharton School and has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management. Her other publications include ""Partners in Reform: Nonprofits and the Welfare State in France,"" in Walter W. Powell and Elisabeth S. Clemens, eds., Private Action and the Public Good.

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