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This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

We illustrate how partial identification methods can be used to provide credible inferences on the causal impacts of food assistance programs, focusing on the impact that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) has on food insecurity among households with children. Recent research applies these methods to address two key issues confounding identification: missing counterfactuals and nonrandomly misclassified treatment status. In this paper, we illustrate and extend the recent literature by using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to study the robustness of prior conclusions. The SIPP confers important advantages: the detailed information about income and eligibility allows us to apply a modified discontinuity design to sharpen inferences, and the panel nature allows us to reduce uncertainty about true participation status. We find that SNAP reduces the prevalence of food insecurity in households with children by at least six percentage points.

Although poverty in the United States has declined over the last half century, it remains a serious problem. This article charts the historical development of the public safety net, starting with means-tested programs and then adding inclusive social insurance programs. Over time, programs targeted at people with low incomes gradually shifted from the local to the state to the national level. Nevertheless, they remained politically vulnerable as policymakers questioned the deservingness of recipients and often tried to limit cash welfare. Those concerns were less salient with inclusive programs like Social Security and Medicare, which expanded rapidly between 1950 and 1980, largely to the benefit of older Americans. The concluding section highlights recent trends that challenge the supposed weakness of means-tested programs and strength of inclusive programs.

This article provides a brief history of evidence-based policy, which it defines as encompassing (1) the application of rigorous research methods, particularly randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to build credible evidence about “what works” to improve the human condition; and (2) the use of such evidence to focus public and private resources on effective interventions. Evidence-based policy emerged first in medicine after World War II, and has made tremendous contributions to human health. In social policy, a few RCTs were conducted before 1980, but the number grew rapidly in U.S. welfare and employment programs during the 1980s and 1990s and had an important impact on government policy. Since 2000, evidence-based policy has seen a major expansion in other social policy areas, including education and international development assistance. A recent milestone is the U.S. enactment of “tiered evidence” social programs in which rigorous evidence is the defining principle in awarding government funding for interventions.

Household food insecurity status in the United States is ascertained by a battery of close-ended questions. We posit that the monthly nature of benefit receipt from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) creates experiences of food hardship, which become salient in the context of SNAP receipt, and in turn exert influence on the response to food security questions. We test this hypothesis by examining answers to a 30-day food security module in relation to when SNAP benefits are received. We find that for SNAP households near the end of or at the beginning of the benefit month, the probability of being classified as food insecure increases by 11 percentage points, over a baseline of 42 percent. We also find that the probability of responding affirmatively to any of the first five items in the module increases during this time. We discuss the importance of these findings for the estimation of food security and its implication on program evaluation.

Participation in the federally subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take-up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight. We use the implementation of BIC in New York City (NYC) to estimate its impact on meals program participation, body mass index (BMI), achievement, and attendance. While we find large effects on participation, our findings provide no evidence of hoped-for gains in academic performance, or of feared increases in obesity. The policy case for BIC will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer-term effects.

Food insecurity rates have risen significantly in the United States, beginning with the recent recession, and remained high. The implications of these high rates are severe in that food insecurity has been associated with a wide range of health, behavioral, social, and cognitive difficulties. This article examines the relationship between the School Breakfast Program (SBP) and food insecurity outcomes. The SBP has the potential to reduce food insecurity because of the direct provision of breakfast to students and the implied income transfer to households. We use state-level cutoffs tied to school-level poverty rates that mandate the provision of the SBP to compare the food security outcomes of students in similar schools, but with different requirements to provide breakfast. Our estimates suggest that state policies requiring schools to offer the SBP have reduced food insecurity for young children.

Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’, it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States’ development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.