Karen M. Tani

Bio: Karen M. Tani is an academic researcher from University of Pennsylvania. The author has contributed to research in topics: Welfare rights & Federalism. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 23 publications receiving 161 citations. Previous affiliations of Karen M. Tani include University of California & University of California, Berkeley.

States of Dependency : Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972

Abstract: Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amid the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on long-standing practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades, asking what happened as money, expertise and ideas travelled from a federal administrative epicenter in Washington, DC, through state and local bureaucracies, and into diverse and divided communities. Drawing on a wealth of previously un-mined legal and archival sources, Karen Tani reveals how reformers attempted to build a more bureaucratic, centralized and uniform public welfare system; how traditions of localism, federalism and hostility toward the 'undeserving poor' affected their efforts; and how, along the way, more and more Americans came to speak of public income support in the powerful but limiting language of law and rights. The resulting account moves beyond attacking or defending Americans' reliance on the welfare state to explore the complex network of dependencies undergirding modern American governance.

Clio and the Compound Republic

Abstract: Although Martha Derthick has received most recognition for her contributions to political science and government, we argue that her astute accounts of federalism in action offer precisely what historians of American governance need at this moment. This essay highlights several of her contributions: her insistence on seeing the United States as a “compound republic” comprised of multiple levels of authority rather than equating government with the national government; her focus on federalism’s shifting dynamics and concern with demonstrating those dynamics empirically; her dedication to studying “the middle tier” and showing that states gained real power during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they took on functions previously performed by localities; and her attentiveness to the endurance of localism in American politics and policy. Drawing on case studies and recent scholarship, we explain why these insights are vital to historians and suggest how historians’ more thorough incorporation of them could enrich our understanding of key aspects of the American past.

States' Rights, Welfare Rights, and the Indian Problem: Negotiating Citizenship and Sovereignty, 1935-1954

Abstract: “What distinguishes the American Indians from other native groups is . . . the nature of their relationship with a government which, while protecting their welfare and their rights, is committed to the principles of tribal self-government and the legal equality of races.” Felix S. Cohen, Chairman, Board of Appeals, United States Department of Interior (1942)“[T]he objective of Congress is to make the Indians self-supporting and into good individual American citizens . . . . You cannot have a good American citizen . . . unless you have a good citizen of the State.” United States Representative Antonio M. Fernandez (D., New Mexico) (1949)“While all this red tape is being untangled, one in need dies without assistance.” David A. Johnson, Sr., Governor and Chairman of the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (1949) These three quotations come from a period in modern American history often remembered for economic depression and war, but perhaps most remarkable for the accompanying changes in governance. Building on Progressive Era innovations, America's federal system became ever more “cooperative”— that is, marked by intricate federal-state personnel and revenue sharing. Meanwhile, Americans witnessed the steady expansion of central state authority. By the 1940s, neither the states nor the federal government enjoyed many areas of exclusive jurisdiction. The federal and state governments' relationships with their subjects were similarly in flux, and the stakes were high. As a result of New Deal social welfare programs, as well as numerous war-related measures, the benefits of state and national citizenship had expanded by the late 1940s. The burdens of citizenship had expanded, too, in the form of higher and broader taxation, compulsory military service, and more government oversight. The stage was set for fierce conflicts over the borders of the nation's political communities and the terms of belonging.

Constitutionalization as Statecraft: Vagrant Nation and the Modern American State

Abstract: This essay showcases the contribution of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) to one field of scholarship that the book scarcely mentions: the historical literature on the American state. In Goluboff's account of the fall of the “vagrancy law regime” in the “long 1960s” I see vital questions about the nature of the modern American state and the endurance of older, seemingly antithetical modes of governance. Given the trends that state-focused scholars have illuminated—for example, toward centralization of power and the protection of individual rights—what allowed for vague, locally enforced vagrancy laws to survive so late into the twentieth century? What ultimately triggered their demise? In mining Vagrant Nation for answers, this essay also urges scholars to contemplate “constitutionalization” as a form of statecraft. In giving a constitutional law framing to the grievances of “vagrants,” federal courts reinforced key tenets of the modern American state, including the supremacy of national law over competing legal orders and the desirability of being a rights-bearing member of the nation-state. Simultaneously, these court decisions left open other, more “modern” possibilities for regulating the kinds of people (poor, nonwhite, unpopular) whom vagrancy laws once ensnared.

Welfare and Rights before the Movement: Rights as a Language of the State

Abstract: In conversations about government assistance, rights language often emerges as a danger: when benefits become “rights,” policymakers lose flexibility, taxpayers suffer, and the poor lose incentive to work. Absent from the discussion is an understanding of how, when, and why Americans began to talk about public benefits in rights terms. This article addresses that lacuna by examining the rise of a vibrant language of rights within the federal social welfare bureaucracy during the 1930s and 1940s. This language is barely visible in judicial and legislative records, the traditional source base for legal-historical inquiry, but amply evidenced by previously un-mined administrative records. Using these documents, this article shows how concepts of “welfare rights” filtered through federal, state, and local administrative channels and into communities around the nation.This finding contradicts conventional wisdom, which dates the birth of “welfare rights” language to the 1960s. This article reveals that as early as 1935, some Americans — government officials, no less — deliberately and persistently employed rights language in communications about welfare benefits. In addition to challenging dominant interpretations, this article identifies an under-studied aspect of rights language. An abundant “rights talk” literature chronicles and critiques claimants’ use of rights language. This article, by contrast, identifies rights language emanating from government and being used for government purposes. Specifically, this article argues that federal administrators used rights language as an administrative tool, a way to solve tricky problems of federalism and administrative capacity at a time in which poor relief was shifting from a local to a state and federal responsibility. Thus this article not only enriches debates about the role of rights in contemporary social welfare reforms, but it also brings fresh insights to scholarship on the techniques of administrators and the limits of federal power.

A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Abstract: Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will …

:Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear

Abstract: Governing through Crime in South AfricaWarum Nationen scheiternGoverning Immigration Through CrimeMafia-LebenScaleDer VorsorgestaatHandbuch JugendkriminalitätThe Crime ConundrumDie SicherheitsgesellschaftDurchbrüche ins Soziale eine Festschrift für Rudolph BauerKriminalitätskontrolle als IndustrieStrafanstalt als BesserungsmaschineDie Vielfalt des RegierensThe Social Sustainability of CitiesGoverning through Crime in South AfricaSurveillance and GovernanceGoverning Through CrimeOrganized crimeDemocratic Theory and Mass IncarcerationCheliax Imperium der Teufel11-SepDefinition und Grenzen der Vorverlagerung von StrafbarkeitMass Incarceration on TrialAlternative CriminologiesGoverning Through Crime : How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of FearCriminal Justice Theory, Volume 26Governing through crime?Laws against strikes. The South African Experience in an international and Comparative PerspectiveIntroduction to critical criminologyGoverning Through Crime in the Northern Territory: Are Criminal Justice System Changes Contributing to Rising Indigenous Imprisonment?After the War on CrimeGoverning Through CrimeInterdisziplinäre RechtsforschungDer CSI-Effekt in DeutschlandThe Contested Politics of MobilityGoverning through Globalised CrimeNeue Theorien des RechtsGoverning Through Globalised CrimeCriminological PerspectivesThe Legal Process and the Promise of Justice

In the shadow of the poorhouse: a social history of welfare in America

Abstract: It is not uncommon for emeritus professors to take a more reflective view of their discipline, or even for them to grapple with the significance of their specialist knowledge for perennial human questions. Leslie Hearnshaw, for many years Professor of Psychology at Liverpool, is better equipped than many for this role, having already written a history of British psychology and the standard biography of Cyril Burt. In this book, he responds strongly to those he sees as jeopardizing an ancient humanist project of psychological knowledge: over-specialized professional psychologists, historians indifferent to present scientific psychology, and critics of the whole progressivist enterprise. The result is an extraordinarily wide-ranging study-very definitely a conscious act of unification-to portray \"psychology\" as a coherent and progressive endeavour, whatever its problematic qualities as science. His story begins with the animism of early cultures, and it runs through the Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the grounding of modern psychology in biology, philosophy, and the German universities in the nineteenth century. There is a separate chapter on \"medical influences\", arguing that it is only with the generation ofJames and Ribot that there is any significant medical psychology. He also attempts to do justice to \"the social dimension\"; and few other histories of psychology have had the breadth to assimilate Marx or Parsons. With the twentieth century, Hearnshaw stresses clearly the \"shaping\" power of the occupational organization and application of psychology, as well as the theoretical and methodological issues which usually dominate such general accounts. In the final chapters, he shows that recent psychology has not been so specialized that it has avoided shaping by philosophical critiques, and he then boldly reviews \"the state of the art\", focusing on the neurosciences and the \"cognitive revolution\". In conclusion, he ventures his own candidate for a unifying \"metapsychology\", based on William Stern's \"personalism\". This is an extraordinary journey, and niggles about detail are out of place, though some passing judgments make one blench. Ultimately, I feel, the book is a declaration of faith. Certainly, it does not engage with the deep difficulties, philosophical and historical, of the enterprise; the key values of continuity, progress, and the striving intellect give the book its form and are not themselves the subject of reflection. As a result the material up till the twentieth century is much less interesting (and in my view less defensible) than what follows, since it becomes a …

Locked out: felon disenfranchisement and American democracy

Abstract: Locked Out provides a substantial empirical basis for reasoned debate on the legitimacy of felon disfranchisement in an ostensibly democratic society. Accomplishing this requires surveying an impressive expanse of history and range of conceptual and empirical questions. Jeff Manza, Chris Uggen and their colleagues meet this challenge by skillfully tying together diverse strands of previous and ongoing research, presenting a sophisticated yet highly accessible study of the origins, dynamics and impact of felon disfranchisement in the context of American democracy. The authors place U.S. policies of disfranchisement in comparative international perspective, revealing its especially restrictive felon voting rights law and policy, particularly as ex-felon disfranchisement (the continued denial of voting rights to those who have completed sentences) is concerned. They compellingly demonstrate that U.S. felon disfranchisement policy originates in efforts to exclude black Americans from democratic participation. Disfranchisement is a criminal justice policy rooted it seems in what American race scholars describe as this nation’s design as a “White Democracy,” originating as a state-level counter-measure to the race-related democratic liberalism forced by federal civil rights protections in the post-emancipation period. As an artifact of historical intentions to limit democratic participation on the basis of race, disfranchisement is not a distortion of American Democracy, but a reflection of a normative, racially oppressive orientation. Disfranchisement policies are defended today on outwardly race-neutral grounds, typically in discourse about preserving the integrity of electoral politics, or their legitimacy as “just desserts” for those in violation of the law. Turning their attention to these contemporary debates, Manza and Uggen show empirically that former felons do not significantly threaten to corrupt or taint political systems, and that the denial of voting rights does not clearly serve some established purpose of punishment. They also show that voting rights restoration is not easily available to former felons, as some legislative advocates contend, and that disfranchisement policies in place today are not generally the Crime Law Soc Change (2007) 47:125–127 DOI 10.1007/s10611-007-9065-5

Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control

Abstract: teen and out-of-wedlock childbearing—that also are sometimes implicated in research on the retreat from marriage. And my reading of the literature is that America’s post1970 economic woes have been experienced rather unequally, yet the ‘‘retreat from marriage’’ has been observed across many different populations—rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural. Economics matter, of course, but other societal shifts must also be implicated in recent marriage trends. Lee nevertheless stays on message—an economic one. Lee is right to remind us that marrying (or not marrying) is not a matter of making good or bad choices but about the choices many of us don’t really have. His goal, in the end, is not to ‘‘promote marriage’’ or extoll its virtues. It is to promote greater opportunity—to expand the choice set—that will allow us to pursue our aspirations (or not) for a fulfilling marriage and satisfying family life. In this, Gary Lee succeeds with flying colors. The Limits of Marriage has my strongest recommendation.