Joe Soss

The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship: Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Politics

Democracies, and the citizenries that stand at their center, are not natural phenomena; they are made and sustained through politics. Government policies can play a crucial role in this process, shaping the things publics believe and want, the ways citizens view themselves and others, and how they understand and act toward the political system. Yet, while political scientists have said a great deal about how publics influence policies, they know far less about the ways policies influence publics. In this article, we seek to clarify how policies, once enacted, are likely to affect political thought and action in the citizenry. Such effects are hard to locate within the standard framework of approaches to mass behavior, and they are generally ignored by program evaluators and policy analysts. To bridge this gap, we direct attention toward a long and vibrant, but underappreciated, line of inquiry we call the “political tradition” of mass behavior research. Drawing this tradition together with recent work on “policy feedback,” we outline a framework for thinking about how policies influence mass politics. The major types of such effects include defining membership; forging political cohesion and group divisions; building or undermining civic capacities; framing policy agendas, problems, and evaluations; and structuring, stimulating, and stalling political participation.

A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback

This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. In the 1990s, “progressive revisionists” argued that, by reforming welfare, liberals could free the Democratic Party of a significant electoral liability, reduce the race-coding of poverty politics, and produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts. Connecting this argument to recent scholarship on policy feedback, we pursue a quantitative case study of the potential for new policies to move public opinion. Our analysis reveals that welfare reform in the 1990s produced few changes in mass opinion. To explain this result, we propose a general framework for the analysis of mass feedback effects. After locating welfare as a “distant-visible” case in this framework, we advance four general propositions that shed light on our case-specific findings as well as the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.

Why Do White Americans Support the Death Penalty

This article explores the roots of white support for capital punishment in the United States. Our analysis addresses individual-level and contextual factors, paying particular attention to how racial attitudes and racial composition influence white support for capital punishment. Our findings suggest that white support hinges on a range of attitudes wider than prior research has indicated, including social and governmental trust and individualist and authoritarian values. Extending individual-level analyses, we also find that white responses to capital punishment are sensitive to local context. Perhaps most important, our results clarify the impact of race in two ways. First, racial prejudice emerges here as a comparatively strong predictor of white support for the death penalty. Second, black residential proximity functions to polarize white opinion along lines of racial attitude. As the black percentage of county residents rises, so too does the impact of racial prejudice on white support for capital punishment.

From policy to polity: Democracy, paternalism, and the incorporation of disadvantaged citizens

This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of “policy feedback” investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstanding questions related to selection bias, the distinction between universal and targeted programs, and the types of authority relations most likely to foster engagement among the poor. Using a longitudinal dataset from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which follows a cohort of low-income parents and their newborn children in 20 U.S. cities, we estimate effects associated with three types of means-tested public assistance. We find that these policies’ effects are not an illusion created by selection bias; the effects of targeted programs can both promote and discourage engagement; and such effects tend to be more positive when a policy’s authority structure reflects democratic rather than paternalist principles.

Devolution, Discretion, and the Effect of Local Political Values on TANF Sanctioning

One of welfare reform’s most significant consequences is the devolution of policy‐making authority from the federal government and states to local governments and frontline workers. What is perhaps less often appreciated is that devolution of authority to state governments has been accompanied by a significant decentralization of policy‐making authority within states. As a result, prior research has not given sufficient attention to local political context as a factor shaping program implementation. This article examines the effect of local political values on the use of sanctions to penalize welfare recipients. Analyzing administrative data from the Florida Department of Children and Families for over 60,000 welfare clients, we find that there is a statistically significant amount of local variation in sanctioning rates across the state of Florida, even after controlling welfare clients’ characteristics. Local sanctioning patterns are systematically related to selected characteristics of local communities, including their ideological orientations.

The third level of US welfare reform: governmentality under neoliberal paternalism

US welfare reform involves more than dramatic caseload reductions and a shift from cash assistance to services. Its operations today reflect significant changes in poverty governance as a disciplinary regime. Welfare policy has been transformed by the rise of a ‘new paternalism’ that is deeply entwined with the globally ascendant market-centered philosophy of ‘neoliberalism.’ In this paper, we explain how ‘governance’ under this new system enacts a particular logic of ‘governmentality’ in which the state acts through nonprofit and for-profit agents to advance the project of ‘governing mentalities’ in low-income target populations. In this system, diverse policy tools are deployed to produce a form of self-discipline that is consonant with the need for compliant low-wage workers in a globalizing economy. Relying on field interviews of case managers in the state of Florida, our analysis follows a chain of disciplinary relationships which runs from the national government through states, down to local contract agencies, and finally to frontline workers and clients. We highlight how performance management systems function to discipline private provider agencies and welfare case workers. Likewise, we explain how sanctions (financial penalties for client noncompliance) figure prominently in such systems as tools deployed to teach self-discipline to recipients. Our field research, however, shows that the new system of poverty governance is one that is fraught with its own tensions and contradictions. We conclude by considering whether poverty governance today relates to what is being called the ‘pedagogical state.’

Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare

To illuminate how race affects the usage of punitive tools in policy implementation settings, we analyze sanctions imposed for noncompliant client behavior under welfare reform. Drawing on a model of racial classification and policy choice, we test four hypotheses regarding client race, local context, and sanctioning. Based on longitudinal and cross-sectional multilevel analyses of individual-level administrative data, we find that race plays a significant role in shaping sanction implementation. Its effects, however, are highly contingent on client characteristics, local political contexts, and the degree to which state governments devolve policy control to local officials.

The Political Roots of Disability Claims: How State Environments and Policies Shape Citizen Demands

Who gets what from government is partly determined by who applies for government programs. Despite the importance of the claiming process, political scientists have said little about the factors that influence citizen demands on government programs. We explore the hypothesis that state environments systematically shape aggregate rates of welfare demand making by testing a model of welfare claiming in the Social Security Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs. Our findings show that in addition to economic need for benefits, the density of civil society organizations, the political ideology of state officials, and the generosity of state-run public assistance programs shape the amount and direction of citizen demands on the welfare system. Although commonalities exist in which variables explain welfare claiming, relationships vary in interesting ways across programs and stages of the claiming process, highlighting the need for a theoretical model of claiming behavior that takes into account such differences.

Spectacular Politics, Dramatic Interpretations: Multiple Meanings in the Thomas/Hill Hearings

Symbolic politics theories suggest that political events take on multiple meanings and that societal groups respond to a given event on the basis of different interpretations. We explore this claim through a quantitative case study of popular responses to a single political spectacle, the Senate hearings that investigated Anita Hills claims against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Our findings suggest that Hill and Thomas supporters responded to the hearings on the basis of fundamentally different considerations. Moreover, the considerations that drove support for each actor varied across groups defined by race, gender, and levels of media attention. Finally, different structures of consideration influenced the direction and extremity of mass responses to this spectacle. Our analysis supports interpretivist theories of political communication and casts doubt on the presumption that citizens with opposing responses to a political event share a common dimension of conflict. In addition, we argue that...

Welfare Application Encounters Subordination, Satisfaction, and the Puzzle of Client Evaluations

Based on interviews with clients in two welfare programs, this article explores three questions regarding application encounters: (a) What criteria do applicants use to evaluate the treatment they receive? (b) How do application experiences affect individuals’ expectations of the status that they will occupy as clients? and (c) How do program designs influence these evaluations and expectations? The analysis sheds new light on a longstanding tension between observation research, which suggests that clients are subordinated in welfare encounters, and survey research, which suggests that clients are satisfied with the treatment they receive. The program comparison also offers a basis for reflecting on recent critiques of the dual U.S. welfare system.