A welfare state is a form of government in which the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life.
Social policy is a plan or action of government or institutional agencies which aim to improve or reform society.
Education policy consists of the principles and policy decisions that influence the field of education, as well as the collection of laws and rules that govern the operation of education systems.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Albert Reinold Hunt Jr. is an American journalist, formerly a columnist for Bloomberg View, the editorial arm of Bloomberg News. Hunt hosted the Sunday morning talk show Political Capital on Bloomberg Television and was also a weekly panelist on CNN's Capital Gang and Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields.
Alice Mitchell Rivlin was an American economist and budget official. Through her public career, she served as the 16th vice chair of the Federal Reserve from 1996 to 1999 and as the 30th director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1996, as well as the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1975 to 1983. A member of the Democratic Party, Rivlin was the first woman to hold each of those posts.
Michael Jay Boskin is the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics and senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He also is chief executive officer and president of Boskin & Co., an economic consulting company.
Peter Benjamin Edelman is an American lawyer, policy-maker, and law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law. He worked as an aide for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and in the Clinton Administration, where he resigned to protest Bill Clinton's signing the welfare reform legislation. Edelman was one of the founders and president of the board of the New Israel Fund.
Jerry Fincher Hough was an American political scientist. Hough was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University and his research focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia, and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist school" on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Joseph Stalin, among other things. He saw the focus of his research and teaching as "the relationship of long term economic development and political institutions". In his final decade he focused on "the American experience in order to better understand the way that states, markets, and democracies develop and the way in which effective and stable ones can be created and maintained."
Paul Pierson is an American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics and holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2007-2010 he served at UC Berkeley as Chair of the Department of Political Science. He is noted for his research on comparative public policy and political economy, the welfare state, and American political development. His works on the welfare state and historical institutionalism have been characterized as influential.
Stuart M. Butler is a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Until 2014, he was Director of the Center for Policy Innovation at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. He is a health care analyst and commentator, and he has also written extensively about urban policy and welfare, credited with introducing the idea of urban enterprise zones to the United States. Butler was an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
Michał Rutkowski is a Polish economist and a World Bank Global Director for Social Protection, Labor and Jobs in Washington, DC. He was recently a Director for Multilateral Organizations (2015–16) and before he was World Bank Country Director for the Russian Federation and a Resident Representative in Moscow (2012–15). He is a former Director for human development in the South Asia region of the World Bank. He is the highest-ranked Polish official at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, and also a former Director of the Office for Social Security Reform in the Government of Poland (1996–97), as well as a co-author of the design of the new Polish pension system. A graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics, with post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics (1989–90) and Harvard Business School (1999). Before joining the World Bank in 1990 Rutkowski was an assistant professor at the Warsaw School of Economics and did research work in the area of labor economics, macroeconomics, education, business development and productivity in the Centre for Labour Economics and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. As a member of the secretariat of the Consultative Economic Council to the Polish government he also advised on early issues of economic and social transition to a market economy in Poland. He was also involved in interdisciplinary development endeavors as a member of the Polish Association for the Club of Rome and the British Association for the Club of Rome.
Lawrence M. Mead III is a professor of politics and public policy at New York University (NYU).
Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst.
Welfare culture refers to the behavioral consequences of providing poverty relief to low-income individuals. Welfare is considered a type of social protection, which may come in the form of remittances, such as 'welfare checks', or subsidized services, such as free/reduced healthcare, affordable housing, and more. Pierson (2006) has acknowledged that, like poverty, welfare creates behavioral ramifications, and that studies differ regarding whether welfare empowers individuals or breeds dependence on government aid. Pierson also acknowledges that the evidence of the behavioral effects of welfare varies across countries, because different countries implement different systems of welfare.
Bernd Marin is an Austrian social scientist.
Robert C. Lieberman is an American political scientist and the former provost of the Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of American political development, Lieberman focuses primarily on race and politics and the American welfare state.
Joel S. Hellman is the dean and distinguished professor in the practice of development at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was appointed in July 2015 and led the school, the oldest school of international affairs in the United States, during the celebration of its centennial anniversary in 2019. Formerly, he was chief institutional economist at the World Bank.
Mary Graham is an American writer and co-director of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Ellen Margaretha Immergut is a political scientist known for her work on electoral and political competition on welfare state reforms, policy analysis, health politics in Europe, and the impact of right-wing populism on social policies.
