One of the most challenging aspects of welfare reform was that it made policy evaluation more difficult, especially after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 allowed states to shift from operating federal public assistance programs (or variants under waiver authority) to implementing programs of their own design. Analysts accustomed to studying a relatively stable set of nationally comparable social programs had to begin asking new, and sometimes startlingly basic, questions about the kinds of benefits that state and local governments were providing, to whom they were providing them, and on what basis. As a result, research on U.S. poverty and welfare reliance suffered a major setback at precisely the time when the need to track policy outcomes became especially critical.

Although many excellent studies now exist, relatively few have investigated policy and program development within a single state in depth—a curious gap given the devolutionary thrust of recent reforms. Lawrence Mead's new book is thus an especially welcome addition to the literature on contemporary welfare policy. It provides a highly detailed yet very readable analysis of the transformation of public assistance in Wisconsin, concentrating on developments within the last 20 years. Importantly, it goes beyond agenda setting and legislation to stress implementation, showing how institutions figured in translating the politics and policy of welfare reform into actual street-level, operational routines. Radical reform was a triumph in Wisconsin, Mead contends, because widespread agreement on policy goals developed where vital preconditions for policy success existed: a moralistic political culture, trust in state government, a tradition of state leadership in social policy, a legislative process focused upon problem solving rather than partisan rivalry, and, perhaps above all, administrative capacity.

Mead's chronicle begins in the 1960s and 1970s, when liberal-minded decisions about antipoverty policy in Wisconsin caused benefit levels to rise and welfare rolls to swell. The national economy could temporarily be blamed for rising client numbers, but as the recession eased, the state “somehow woke up to its welfare problem more fully than before” (p. 23). The belief that Wisconsin had become a magnet attracting poor families in search of generous public assistance helped to shatter the liberal welfare consensus and to reorient the state toward experiments with welfare-to-work strategies. These in turn paved the way for the more dramatic initiatives of Governor Tommy Thompson, who moved immediately after taking office in 1987 to cut benefits, expand work requirements, and jail absent fathers who failed to pay child support. Thompson also aggressively pursued waivers of federal rules governing the administration of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, and negotiated a financial agreement allowing the state to retain the savings from roll reductions, enabling Wisconsin to tinker with AFDC without directly denying aid or conditioning it upon work. As Congress and President Clinton argued over how to end welfare “as we'd known it,” the state had the necessary authority and resources to adopt increasingly stringent rules that variously diverted citizens from receiving public assistance or granted aid subject to family caps, time limits, work requirements, monitoring, and sanctions for noncompliance.

The Wisconsin Works (W-2) program was enacted in early 1996 in an effort to return welfare in the state “to first principles”: no entitlement, and work as a condition of aid for all but the completely incapacitated. Its implementation was not without problems. Counties varied in their approaches and achievements; needy citizens were often confused, deterred, or denied aid they were eligible for; child care was uncoordinated and insufficient; and many families were sanctioned. However, these problems were gradually ironed out, and W-2 won awards for its structural innovations and its generation of large caseload reductions. In Mead's view, the program proved that traditional welfare could virtually be abolished. By supplying work supports such as health care in exchange for strict compliance with work requirements and by transforming caseworkers into “authority figures as well as helpmates,” W-2 provided a combination of “help and hassle” that enabled welfare clients to learn about mainstream values and rise above the defeatism governing their lives (p. 158). This was a triumph for both paternalism and the statecraft that lay behind it.

Mead thoroughly demonstrates that the quality and capacity of government influenced the design and implementation of Wisconsin's welfare policies. However, he is less persuasive in arguing that welfare reform was a success in Wisconsin, because that assessment is inadequately substantiated by the argument and evidence presented in the book. This is unfortunate, particularly since other accounts covering the same time period are less sanguine about the effects of the Wisconsin reforms.

Much of the analysis in Government Matters hinges upon the definition of the welfare “problem” as dependence upon public aid. Accepting that definition logically implies that policy success should be measured in terms of the elimination of dependency. Yet, as even Mead admits, there is scant proof that reform policies drove down the rolls, eliminated hardship, or significantly improved the lives of the poor. Work levels increased, but data revealed the persistence of very low incomes among welfare leavers, rendering public benefits necessary in addition to earnings “to assure the poor a decent life” (p. 213). What, then, did Wisconsin's “masterful regime” achieve? Not the elimination of dependency—the goal often invoked in Mead's narrative—but, rather, the near obliteration of cash welfare coupled with the restoration of social order, defined as the enforcement of wage work and the imposition of “structure” on poor mothers and children.

One might argue that the book was written before a sufficiently large body of research existed to indicate the success of Wisconsin's reforms. Even if that were the case, however, there would still be a remarkable correlation between the author's assertion of policy success and the normative underpinnings of his earlier scholarship. There, he argued that the primary challenge of the American welfare state is not to protect workers from the vicissitudes of market capitalism, but rather to make workers out of the poor. Because welfare recipients lack the motivation or ability to accept responsibility for themselves and their dependents, public policy must mandate compliance with work as the foremost duty of citizenship.

Ideas influence the direction of public policy just as surely as institutional legacies and capacities do. The book would have benefited from the inclusion of a more candid and expansive discussion of the ideational shifts that have occurred over time between individual and structural explanations of poverty, and the connections between those shifts and the changing shape of welfare policy. Mead frames work enforcement as an obvious structural compromise between entitlements and the elimination of welfare. Yet work enforcement proposals no more surfaced naturally or inevitably during the 1980s than did Wisconsin's sudden concern about burgeoning welfare rolls. The rise of dependency on the governmental agenda was driven powerfully by a conservative turn in American politics; by public rhetoric about welfare queens that revived old, deeply gendered and racialized stereotypes and resentments; and by new calls to use state authority to impose behavioral standards upon the poor. So, too, was Wisconsin's decision to eschew the advice of its own administrators and university experts in favor of welfare policy advice from external think tanks and consultants, Mead included. These developments were not merely the product of institutional muddling through.

Nor was Wisconsin's embrace of privatization in the form of contracting out simply the result of institutional or even economic dynamics. The state's adoption of this mode of service delivery was also ideologically driven, part of a much broader push to reinvent government in the United States and abroad. Mead asserts that contracting did not prevent welfare in Wisconsin from “remain[ing] a public enterprise, with public officials firmly in control” (p. 133), but the failure to monitor contractors through active and effective public oversight and management is a well-documented problem from which W-2 and many other privatized programs suffered. This further calls into question the conclusion that welfare reform in Wisconsin was an exercise in good “government.”

Despite these shortcomings, Government Matters provides a valuable portrait of the political and administrative dimensions of putting policy into practice over time. It is an important book that raises vitally important questions about the contemporary American welfare state, governance, and the meaning of citizenship. Even those who disagree with the author's normative stance will find it enlightening.