The Electoral Effects of Social Policy: Expanding Old-Age Assistance, 1932–1940

Under what conditions do means-tested programs increase beneficiaries' political participation? Recent scholarship has begun to shed light on this question through a series of causal studies of Medicaid expansion. This article builds on those analyses by exploring an additional case, the US expansion of Old-Age Assistance (OAA) programs between 1932 and 1940. It provides new evidence that means-tested programs can mobilize their beneficiaries and also sheds light on how these effects emerge. Exploiting state-by-state variation in expansion, I find that increases in OAA generosity increased turnout in elderly counties but increases in the OAA coverage rate did not. These findings show that resource effects are crucial to generating positive feedback and can do so even in the case of a highly stigmatizing, means-tested program. I further find that by mobilizing elderly Republican recipients, OAA cost FDR votes in Republican-leaning counties, suggesting that even positive participatory effects may undermine social programs' entrenchment.