Western Europe Vs America

In the United States (U.S.), it is very clear that public policies which redistribute from the rich to the poor are much less comprehensive and extensive than those offered in the majority of Western Europe. Both the United States and Western Europe, however, are wealthy, similar, democratic societies who share common cultural and religious roots. Yet, the American government takes a smaller percentage of this wealth than any other democratic government in the world. Compounding this idea of a stark contrast between Europe, an Irish sociologist stated: “The simplest difference between the United States of America and Europe is that we have welfare states, they do not.” Contemporarily, America’s welfare state is less generous than its European

welfare state and the Europeans, is union strength. In Europe, workers developed strong union movements that could be used as political support for policy activists in their attempts to build welfare state programs. Additionally, European unions tended to be much larger and stronger than their American counterparts, acting as powerful allies to Socialist political parties pushing for welfare state programs. In contrast, the distinctive feature of twentieth century American labor movements is the weakness and the anti political strategy they adopted as a result of institutional barriers. Once again, the difference between America and Europe is Federalism; In Europe, union political battles were for worker protection (social security) and the right to organize (unions) nationally. In the United States, these same battles, were state battles; This minor difference sets up radically different political and economic constraints and incentives. In the United States, as soon as a state would consider the interests and demands of working-class reformers, entrepreneurs and their capital would threaten to leave the state for other states with a "more favorable" environment. Thus, this form of federalism dramatically enhanced the "exit" option for capital, and in so doing dramatically biased the game against strong working-class

At the end of the 19th century, all modernizing democracies were caught between the demand for a more responsive political system on the one hand, and the demand for more efficient decision-making institutions on the other; America had neither. Due to Federal separation of powers in the United States, the battle between the executive and the legislature was structured quite differently than its European counterparts; the executive and legislative branches of government were constitutionally separated and democratically legitimate. Thus, the executive in America was therefore better able to fight off the encroachment of its power by the legislature than its European counterparts. While, European polities eventually addressed this dilemma through the centralization of political authority. Congress, instead chose to protect institutional prerogatives, creating an elaborate committee system that devolved political authority for particular policy decisions to individual committees and subcommittees; they created "committee government." Lloyd Cutter explains: “Each member of Congress gains access to his or her own base of institutional power and therefore is less dependent upon those higher up the institutional hierarchy for support.”