Tracing the welfare-rights connection in American disability policymaking

The movement to incorporate disability rights within national social policy objectives in the United States began with entrepreneurial policymakers seeking new pathways to expand the civil rights project. Yet, political entrepreneurs did not call for the disbanding of a decades-old social welfare-oriented policy model. Instead, what emerged was a multi-paradigmatic client-service/citizen-rights model drawing from established core (neo) liberal values of independence and productivity underlying and expanding the rehabilitation mandate. The way rights came onto the policy agenda had important implications for subsequent policymaking where a separate-and-unequal system of civil rights excluded people with disabilities from a more robust civil rights policy community and later, a human rights framework. The development of disability policy highlights important aspects of policy agenda setting and the role (and limitations) of institutional entrepreneurship in generating policy half-solutions susceptible to retrenchment efforts, and the role of citizen mobilization in protecting policy from downstream reversals.