On Thursday, 5 July 1945, the British electorate appeared to draw a line under the prewar political world. This electorate turned the wartime government, led by the Conservative party, out of office. Moreover, it dismissed the Conservatives in favor of a party that still harbored doubts about its proper governing role, namely, British Labour. The scale of this reversal was additionally unprecedented. Labour had only ever formed minority, shortlived governments before; its last such venture, in 1929, had seen the party take power just in time to acquire responsibility for the Great Depression. The Tories had thus returned to effective leadership in 1931, such that Tory electoral and governmental dominance was still the context for the 1945 election. Now, however, Labour had returned with not just an absolute but an enormous majority in Parliament: it gained more seats than the Tories were left holding. And this over a party that had arguably weathered the Great Depression and saved the nation in a world war.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, national health insurance returned briefly to the political limelight with renewed calls for a single-payer health-care system that would eliminate any significant role for commercial insurers in the provision of health care. Organized labor, however, which had been a longtime proponent of national health insurance, did not warmly embrace the single-payer solution. Instead, much of the national leadership of organized labor supported some kind of employer-mandate solution that would require employers to pay a portion of their employees' health insurance premiums, thus leaving the private welfare state of job-based medical benefits largely intact.

Do party ideologies matter in the making of public policy in the United States? The conventional answer to this question is equivocal. The American parties are generally considered to be less ideological than their Anglo European brethren. More important perhaps, these parties seem to lack the organizational characteristics necessary to implement such ideologies (were they present to begin with). With fragmented leadership in the legislature, a decentralized system of candidate selection and a federalist, divided-powers constitutional regime, the American political system seems inhospitable—if not downright inimical—to party ideology. The American parties, writes Theodore Lowi, are “constituent parties and have almost never been ‘responsible,’policy-making parties.”

Gossip has long been one of the most dismissed fotms of communication. Since the 1920s, nonetheless, some social scientists have attempted to understand gossip and its social utility. These scholars (be they anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, linguists, historians, or feminists) have argued that gossip plays a significant role in a number of both premodern and modern communities. However, despite a growing body of work that examines gossip in the private sphere, there has been almost no discussion of the role of gossip in public policy or, more specifically, in welfare state administration. This article will attempt to rectify that omission by providing evidence of how state administrators in one jurisdiction in two historical periods have utilized gossip to help determine which poor single mothers should receive welfare. I argue that this is not merely a custom of early administrators during the formative years of the welfare state but, rather, that the contemporary welfare state apparatus accommodates, and even encourages, the use of gossip in present-day welfare administration.