Sanford F. Schram

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.

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.’

Postmodern policy analysis: Discourse and identity in welfare policy

Postmodern inquiry into the discursive construction of identity has the potential to make a distinctive, democratizing contribution to public policy analysis. More so than conventional approaches, a postmodern policy analysis offers the opportunity to interrogate assumptions about identity embedded in the analysis and making of public policy, thereby enabling us to rethink and resist questionable distinctions that privilege some identities at the expense of others. Public policy analysis can benefit from postmodernisms emphasis on how ‘discourse’ constructs ‘identity.’ A review of postmodernism and postmodern approaches to interrogating identity is followed by an exercise in postmodern policy analysis. Social welfare policy in contemporary ‘postindustrial’ America is shown to participate in the construction and maintenance of identity in ways that affect not just the allocation of public benefits, but also economic opportunities outside of the state. Mired in old, invidious distinctions (e.g., independent/dependent, contract/charity, family/promiscuity), welfare policy discourse today helps to recreate the problems of yesterday, particularly as a critical factor in reproducing womens poverty.

Without cause or effect: Reconsidering welfare migration as a policy problem

Theory: Stories of welfare migration are often statistical narratives of economic rationality that portray welfare migrants as engaging in economically rational but illegitimate behavior. Three waves of scholarly studies of welfare migration can be delineated as reinforcing these stories with second-wave studies in particular providing evidence of welfare migration. Yet, it is questionable that: (1) state welfare benefits vary enough to induce welfare migration; (2) high levels of migration actually occur; and (3) the migration patterns of poor families ought to be narrated as economically rational behavior directed toward the maximization of welfare benefits. Hypotheses: Variation in the real value of welfare benefits is small. Welfare migration is an infrequent occurrence making for a small proportion of the total welfare budget. Better explanations narrate the migration patterns of poor families in terms other than those narrowly focused on welfare benefits. Methods: Data on welfare benefits and per capita income is used to assess the real value of welfare benefits. Data from the Public Use Microdata Set 5% sample of the United States Census is used to track the migration routes of poor single mothers with children. Results: Combined maximum benefits from Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Food Stamps are found to vary across the states only slightly more than per capita income. Approximately 90% of poor single mothers with children are not likely to move out-of-state over a five year period. Poor single mothers with children are not more likely to move to states with higher benefits. Narratives that account for alternative reasons, including increased safety, improved housing, better economic opportunities, and family ties, should be explored as explanations of the migration patterns of poor single mothers with children.

Contextualizing Racial Disparities in American Welfare Reform: Toward a New Poverty Research

As a result of the 1996 reforms, the number of welfare recipients has declined precipitously, and the reform effort has been heralded a “success.” However, a growing body of research indicates racial disparities in client treatment and outcomes under welfare reform. These findings have inaugurated a debate about interpreting racial disparities under welfare reform and determining what corrective action, if any, is necessary. Some analysts contend that welfare reform, as a post–civil rights era, racially neutral public policy, can legitimately have differential outcomes for different racial groups. I argue that this claim must be countered with a new poverty research that goes beyond the limits of mainstream work by placing welfare reform in its historical and social context, thereby providing a more robust explanation of how and to what effect welfare reform is race-biased. I show how welfare reform contributes to what Loic Wacquant calls “racemaking” by being part of a racial policy regime that has developed from past policy but reinforces current racial inequalities.

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 return of ordinary capitalism : neoliberalism, precarity, occupy

Preface Chapter 1 The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism as the New Normal Chapter 2 Middle-Class Melancholia: Self-Sufficiency after the Demise of Christianized Capitalism (U.S. Style) Chapter 3 Occupy Precarity: Resisting the Limits of Collective Agency under Neoliberalism Chapter 4 The Deep Semiotic Structure of Deservingness: Discourse and Identity in Neoliberal Welfare Policy Chapter 5 The End of Social Work: Implementing a Neoliberal Paternalism (with Basha Silverman) Chapter 6 Schooling the Corporatized Citizen/Corporatizing the School: From Grade School through College Chapter 7 The Next Neoliberal Thing: Social Impact Bonds Chapter 8 Getting Beyond Neoliberalism: The Road to Radical Incrementalism Notes Index

Civil disorder and the welfare explosion: a two-step process.

Upon not finding a direct relationship between civil disorder and welfare growth in American cities in the late 1960s, some analysts have rejected the Piven and Cloward (1971) thesis that the expansion of welfare in the late 1960s operated largely as aform of social control so as to recreate political stability. We hypothesize that the welfare explosion in the late 1960s was in part the result of a two-step process in which civil disorder impelled the national government to enact liberalizations of welfare policy which in turn were most actively implemented by those states most wracked by rioting. Analysis of the relative state growth rates in the number offamilies receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children suggests the plausibility of our hypothesis and the Piven and Cloward thesis. Piven and Clowards (1971) thesis on the role of welfare in western capitalist societies lies at the center of the debate over the welfare explosion of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. According to Piven and Cloward, the historical role of public-welfare has been one of cyclical expansion and contraction in response to the alternating needs of the state for political stability and acceptance of lowwage work by the poor. During times of political stability, public welfare primarily functions to enforce on the poor the work norm of selfsufficiency by restricting access to aid. During periods of unrest among the poor, public welfare functions largely to promote political stability by easing the poors access to aid. In the 1960s the growing political unrest of poor blacks escalated into over 160 major riots between 1965 and 1968 (Feagin and Hahn, 1973) and prompted the dramatic rise in welfare recipients in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Piven and Cloward, 1971:222-47). Various researchers have provided empirical support for the relationship between civil disorder and welfare growth in the late 1960s (Betz, 1974; Jennings, 1979; Isaac and Kelly, 1981). Critics, however, have rejected this thesis upon finding no relationship between riottorn cities and increases in welfare (Durman, 1973; Albritton, 1979). Our analysis seeks to resolve these conflicting findings. We provide evidence supportive of the hypothesis that the welfare explosion was in part the result of a

Beyond Paradigm: Resisting the Assimilation of Phronetic Social Science

David Laitin uses Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter as a surrogate manifesto on behalf of the Perestroika movement’s campaign for methodological pluralism in political science. After an overview of Perestroika, I note my own vision for the movement, outline the most significant features of Flyvbjerg’s call for a revived social science, and provide a critique of Laitin’s attempt to assimilate Flyvbjerg’s analysis to his own vision for an improved political science. I conclude with a word about the potential of Perestroika to build on Flyvbjerg’s insights to promote what I call “post-paradigmatic” social science.