Suzanne Mettler

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.

Bringing the State Back In to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II Veterans

American civic engagement soared in the mid-twentieth century, succeeding an era in which national government had become more involved in citizens lives than ever before. I examine the effects of the G.I. Bills educational provisions for veterans subsequent memberships in civic organizations and political activity. I consider theoretical arguments about how public social programs might affect civic involvement and advance a policy feedback approach that assesses both resource and interpretive effects of policy design. Newly collected survey and interview data permit the examination of several hypotheses. The analysis reveals that the G.I. Bill produced increased levels of participation—by more fully incorporating citizens, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, through enhancement of their civic capacity and predisposition for involvement. The theoretical framework offered here can be used to evaluate how other public programs affect citizens participation in public life.

Civic generation: Policy feedback effects of the GI Bill on political involvement over the life course

One of the chief explanations for the decline of social capital in the United States is the passing of the ‘civic generation’, those who came of age during the Depression and the Second World War. These Americans experienced greater government largesse than previous generations, yet we know little about how public programmes influenced their subsequent involvement in public life. This article draws on policy feedback theory to examine how the educational benefits of the GI Bill, through which 7.8 million Second World War veterans attended college or gained vocational training, affected recipients political participation across three time periods, from 1950 to 1998. We find that initially, interpretive effects of programme implementation produced increased levels of participation among users generally. Later on, resource effects enhanced participation rates selectively, with the strongest effects among those who had attained the highest levels of education. Overall, the study illustrates distinct mechanisms, timing and sequencing through which public policy can shape the interests and capacities of programme recipients to engage in democratic participation.

Bringing Government Back into Civic Engagement: Considering the Role of Public Policy

Abstract Analyses of the determinants of civic engagement give little heed to the role of government in citizens lives. The nascent research in this area suggests that citizens experiences of public programs can influence their rate of civic involvement and their attitudes about government. Features of policy design—the extent of resources bestowed on citizens, the messages conveyed through program rules and procedures, and the degree of visibility of governments role—may each influence the extent and form of program effects. Changes in public provision over time may help explain the rise and decline of civic engagement.

“The Only Good Thing Was the G.I. Bill”: Effects of the Education and Training Provisions on African-American Veterans' Political Participation

The education and training benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights are renowned for their redistributive effects among nonblack veterans, but their consequences for black veterans remain in question. Among non-blacks, the provisions are known to have expanded access to education across class lines, and to have generated positive socioeconomic consequences. They also fostered greater postwar involvement in civic associations and political activities, particularly among less advantaged beneficiaries. Given the widely perceived view that the G.I. Bill represents a landmark social program, it is imperative to investigate whether access to its social and economic benefits transcended the rigid color line of the postwar era. As well, consideration of how the education and training benefits affected African-American veterans political participation may deepen our understanding of the relationship between governance and civic engagement.

American Political Development from Citizens' Perspective: Tracking Federal Government's Presence in Individual Lives over Time

AlthoughscholarsofAmericanpoliticaldevelopment(APD) have helped transform many aspects of thestudy of U.S. politics over the last quarter-century,they have barely begun to use the powerful analyticaltools of this approach to elucidate the relationshipbetween government and citizens. APD research hasprobed deeply into the processes of state-buildingand the creation and implementation of specific pol-icies, yet has given little attention to how such devel-opment affects the lives of individuals and the waysin which they relate to government. Studies routinelyilluminatehowpoliciesinfluencethepoliticalrolesofelites and organized groups, but barely touch on howthe state shapes the experiences and responsesof ordinary individuals. As a result, we know littleabout how governance has influenced citizenshipovertimeorhowthosechangeshave,inturn,affectedpolitics.Presumably state development influences manydifferent aspects of citizenship, each of which is criti-cal to the state’s legitimacy, authority, and power.Different periods of governance might affect theextent to which individuals possess a sense of civicobligation and duty or a claim to specific rights. Insome political eras, citizens may derive their identityfrom the state; in others, theymaydo so in oppositionto the state. Given disparities in the ways policies mayaffect different groups of people, governance couldcreate separate forms of status and stratify the citi-zenry; alternatively, some policies might foster asense of social solidarity even among those who aresituated differently in terms of class, race, or gender.The form taken by governing arrangements acrosstime is likely to shape citizens’ attitudes about andlevels of support for government generally and forparticular policies. Perhaps most significant, distinctregimes may mobilize citizens to participate tovaryingdegrees,in differentways,and fordiversepur-poses. Each of these relationships lies well within thedomain of American political development and thusAPD scholars ought to be able to explain muchabout them.Yet, such concerns remain on the margins of APDscholarship, typically discussed briefly—if at all—inthe final chapters of books or conclusions of articles.In effect, APD scholars have ceded the study ofindividual political behavior to behavioralists andrational choice scholars. Unfortunately, neithergroup employs the analytical tools necessary tograpple effectively with the questions posed above.Behavioralists tend to conduct their analysis from asociety-centric starting point, considering politicalinstitutions and policies only as an endpoint of politi-cal behavior rather than potentially as a formativeinfluence upon it; rational choice scholars, conver-sely, typically assume how institutions influence

Dividing Social Citizenship by Gender: The Implementation of Unemployment Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children, 1935–1950

The Social Security Act of 1935 is widely considered to have established an American welfare state that is “two-tiered” or “two-track” in character, and which divided American social citizenship by gender. This depiction is commonplace; for a recent example of its use, see Dian ne Sainsbury, Gender Equality and Welfare States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28–29. It seems to have originated in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minnen apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 144–60 and Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmens Compensation and Mothers Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Mn adison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123–51. Scholars have generally assumed that to the extent such “gender bias” emerged in public policy, it must have been manifest in the law from the outset, inscribed in the differn ences between the work-related, contributory plans in the legislation versus the need-based, grant-in-aid public assistance programs. For example, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 253–85; also Fraser, Unruly Practices, 149–53. Yet, although the two major social programs for non-elderly American in the Social Security Act differed in such ren gards, they emerged from the policymaking process in 1935 on fairly equal ground, with seemingly similar prospects for success or failure.

The Stratification of Social Citizenship: Gender and Federalism in the Formation of Old Age Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children

Recently, scholars have shown that welfare state development, across nations, has often incorporated social groups in distinct ways that stratify and divide the citizenry. Citizenship has become stratified in terms of gender as policymakers have treated men and women differently in the policymaking process, perpetuating ascribed roles and institutionalizing gender inequality. The American welfare state that was fashioned in the New Deal has long been regarded as a two-tiered system that divided men and women as social citizens, incorporating them into distinct types of programs for economic security and welfare. How was such stratification of citizenship created in the course of the policymaking process? Some scholars have surmised that policymakers ideas about gender were responsible for gendered outcomes; others have suggested that preexisting institutional arrangements foreordained the two-tiered results. Neither of these approaches, however, has offered an adequate explanation. In order to examine how social citizenship became organized in the New Deal in terms of gender, this article investigates the politics of the formation of two core programs of the Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935, both Old Age Insurance (OAI), which is now called simply social security, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the program that became known as welfare and which stayed fairly intact until its transformation in 1996. The article will argue that the most critical aspects of the stratification of citizenship emerged primarily from political battles over the proper institutional arrangements for program administration, conflicts that appeared to have nothing to do with gender. Granted, from the start, policymakers set out to design separate programs for wage-earners, who were predominantly male in the 1930s, than for non-wage-earners, who were predominantly female. By them-