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The article trace the origin and development of the Social Security Act of 1935 in the U.S. Once the question of the constitutionality of the Social Security program was decided in Helvering v. Davis in 1937, the program was promoted as an insurance program. The article explores the efforts of the Fraternal Order of Eagles (FOE) in developing a pension program in the country.

Political scientists working in the area of American Political Development (APD) focus on America?s political history with the goal of explaining why the nation?s often peculiar collection of institutions and policies grew the way they have. Two primary approaches or schools of inquiry shape much APD scholarship, though a great deal of very fine work falls outside of them. Historical institutionalists study actors pursuing interests through a political arena bounded by institutions. Ideational scholars, by contrast, seek to understand how norms, narratives, and outlooks influence the framing of debates and their outcomes. Although there are exceptions, especially at the margins, each of the two schools is marked by a general outlook. Previous discussions of the two schools have focused on the place of culture and ideas in relation to institutions. I argue that the two schools split along more fundamental lines, and suggest that the crucial distinction between them centers on the nature of causation and on an often-unstated understanding of what political development is. By mapping out the theoretical underpinnings of each, we can introduce APD?s methods to researchers outside the subfield, and also ask how they might be drawn together for even more powerful inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a mystery. The dominant narrative about insurance companies in the early decades of the twentieth century is that they opposed any development of the American state into the field of mutual assistance, most notably in the field of public health. Their opposition to the AALL’s 1915 model health bill, for example, is legendary. Yet when we dig farther, we see that the company which arguably did more to get the state involved in public health was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, whose campaign for public health won an award from the Harvard Business School, and whose data collection program was branched off to become part of the U.S. Department of Public Health. This article explores why the story of the Metropolitan has remained uncovered by academics, and suggests the full role of insurers in Progressive Era health policy development has yet to be told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a formal definition of what political development is: Political development is a durable shift in ideas or institutions that alters the feasible set of options open to solving political problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]