Brian Steensland

Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State: The Case of Guaranteed Income Policy1

There is considerable evidence that cultural categories of worth are central to the ideological foundation of the American welfare state. However, existing perspectives on U.S. welfare policy development grant little explanatory power to the role of culture. For this reason, they cannot adequately explain the dynamics of an important, but frequently overlooked, episode in American welfare state history: the rise and fall of guaranteed annual income proposals in the 1960s and 1970s. The author outlines three mechanisms—schematic, discursive, and institutional—through which culture can influence policy outcomes. He then argues that cultural categories of worthiness affected welfare policy development through their constitutive contribution to cultural schemas, their deployment by actors as resources in expert deliberation and public discourse, and their institutionalization in social programs that reinforced the symbolic and programmatic boundaries between categories of the poor. The author discusses how these cultural mechanisms can be integrated with existing class‐ and institution‐based accounts of welfare policy development.

Why do Policy Frames Change? Actor-Idea Coevolution in Debates over Welfare Reform

One shortcoming in the literature on policy framing has been the absence of analytic models through which to explicate change. This paper advances research in this area in three related ways. First, it links policy frames to the actors who employ them. Second, based upon this linkage it proposes two complementary approaches for examining longitudinal change in policy framing: an actor representation approach and a frame adoption approach. Third, it assesses the relative contribution of each process using demographic decomposition analysis. This analytic framework is illustrated using the case of debates over welfare reform in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The findings are consistent with expectations from the frame adoption approach, suggesting that ideational diffusion was largely responsible for changing discourse during this period.

Moral Classification and Social Policy

Moral classification is fundamental to social life, and one of the most powerful sources of moral classification in modern society is governmental social policy. This chapter outlines the connections between moral classification and social inequality, discusses the role of the state in creating official classification schemes, and illustrates how social policy both responds to and produces moral categories in society. The chapter concludes by suggesting that future research should devote more attention to the causal influence of moral categories on social policy development.