Paths to (de)centralization: Changing territorial dynamics of social policy in the People’s Republic of China and the United States

Drawing on the existing welfare state literature, this article offers a comparative analytical framework to account for the territorial dynamics of social policy in the United States and the People’s Republic of China, two countries that are most dissimilar in terms of political regime but that may exhibit similar territorial patterns of social policy fragmentation. A promising way to explore such patterns, we argue, is to analyze how changes in the architecture of major governing institutions affect the territorial dimension of social policy. In the United States, state governments and a territorially-organized federal legislature have increasingly accommodated national political parties. These two parties have turned the politics of social policy into a debate over the boundaries of national or state governance of social policy, resulting in multi-level governance frameworks. In the People’s Republic of China, the partisan dimension is absent, but strong economic pressures on the central bureaucracy have made devolution a functional imperative and have given local governments increasing leverage when bargaining with the center.