WHY ARE THERE NO UNIVERSAL SOCIAL PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES?: A Historical Institutionalist Comparison with Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much has been written about “American exceptionalism” in social policy, but one aspect has received relatively little attention thus far: the absence of universal public social programs where entitlements to benefits and services are derived from citizenship or residency. This absence is especially striking because other liberal welfare regimes such as Canada and the United Kingdom have long developed such programs. Focusing on policy design and using Canada as a contrasting case, this article explains why there are no universal social programs in the United States, a country where the dichotomy between social assistance and social insurance dominates. The empirical analysis focuses on three policy areas: health, pensions, and family benefits. Stressing the impact of institutional factors on policy design, the article adopts a historical institutionalist approach and shows that the explanation for the absence of universal social programs varies from one policy area to the next.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".