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VOICES OF WELFARE REFORM: BUREAUCRATIC RATIONALITY
VERSUS PARTICIPANT PERCEPTIONS*
Ann Tickamyer and Debra Henderson
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Julie White
Department of Political Science
Barry Tadlock
Voinovich Center
Rural Welfare Reform Project
Voinovich Center for Leadership and Public Affairs
Ohio University, Athens, OH
* Published in AFFILIA, Volume 15, No. 2, Summer 2000, 171-190.
Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings
of the Rural Sociological Society, Chicago, IL, August 5,
1999 and the National Association of Welfare Research and
Statistics, Cleveland, OH, August 10, 1999.
Abstract
This paper compares the assumptions behind recent welfare
reform with actual program implementation to show the fundamental
underlying contradictions in the way policy is politically
justified and implemented. Feminist critiques of poverty and
welfare policy provide the foundation for an analysis of focus
groups with women on welfare in four rural, Appalachian Ohio
counties. Results demonstrate the disparities between the
"top-down" goals of welfare policy and the "bottom-up" perceptions
of their outcomes. We conclude with policy recommendations
based on a feminist perspective that advocates democratic
participation in program design and implementation to bring
programs in line with participant needs rather than bureaucratic
exigencies.
VOICES OF WELFARE REFORM:
BUREAUCRATIC RATIONALITY VERSUS PARTICIPANT PERCEPTIONS
Introduction
Welfare policy in the United
States, like much other public policy, is guided by economic
models that assume a rational calculus of cost and benefit for
both the macro level impacts of programs and their individual
beneficiaries. Thus most policy implicitly or explicitly incorporates
a behavioral model that assumes individual actors operate as
rational entities to calculate self-interest or "utility" and
act accordingly. In this view, policy and programs should be
designed to encourage policy goals through pursuit of individual
self-interest. Yet recent critiques of the welfare system and
the current effort at its reorganization focus on perceived
failures of past programs and policies to incorporate and promote
core societal values such as economic independence and self-sufficiency
in such a way that they encourage pursuit of these goals.
In this paper we first review
the recent history of welfare reform to demonstrate the behavioral
assumptions embedded in the rhetoric of political discourse
on this topic, then show how the voices of women on welfare
illustrate the underlying contradictions in the way policy is
politically justified and implemented. Feminist critiques of
poverty and welfare policy provide the foundation for our analysis.
Focus groups with welfare recipients in four rural, Appalachian
Ohio counties supply the data to demonstrate the disparities
between the "top-down" goals of welfare policy and the "bottom-up"
perceptions of their outcomes. We conclude with policy recommendations
based on a feminist interpretation of these findings.
Brief Recent History of Welfare Reform
Current welfare policies are
a legacy of the conservative attack on the liberal welfare state
that gained momentum in the Reagan era and subsequently became
entrenched in political discourse by the beginning of this decade.
By the time that President Clinton took office, welfare reform
had became a bipartisan preoccupation, with only minor variation
in the types of changes advocated across the political parties.
Clinton administration policy wonks found common ground with
a newly Republican Congressional majority to drastically alter
the parameters of the safety net. Thus, it is not surprising
that one of the few widely acknowledged "successes" of the Clinton
administration domestic policy agenda is the PRWORA, the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,
the welfare reform bill whose purpose was "to end welfare as
we know it."
This legislation did, in fact,
put an end to War on Poverty programs that entitled means qualified
recipients to public assistance. Most notably, it marked the
end of the primary program of cash assistance, AFDC (Aid to
Families with Dependent Children), and substituted more circumscribed
measures such as TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)
whose purpose was seen as temporary, limited, and geared toward
moving recipients into self-sufficiency through formal labor
market employment. The legislation gave the states great flexibility
in designing and implementing their own welfare programs, but
a primary parameter was a 60 month lifetime maximum for assistance.
Many states, including Ohio, designed programs that placed far
lower limits on eligibility, usually restricting it to two or
three years maximum.
The route to creating political
consensus on the need for welfare reform can be traced in the
debates about causes, consequences, and remedies for poverty
that emerged from the perceived failure of War on Poverty programs
in the decades that followed their expansion. Poverty analysts
have created a vast literature demonstrating the underlying
assumptions and biases that pervade both political discourse
and social research on poverty, the lives of the poor, and the
politics of welfare policy and reform (Katz 1996, Gordon 1990,
Schram1995, Tickamyer 1995-96). Foremost among the issues that
figure prominently is the issue of dependency and its sources.
Increasingly, the welfare system was redefined as the cause
of poverty and dependency rather than its remedy. The most influential
of these attacks came from the right in a "war on welfare" that
reversed the logic of the War on Poverty by inverting the causal
link between poverty and welfare. While liberal analysis saw
welfare programs as a necessary response to complex social problems
ranging from discrimination to economic restructuring that limited
the opportunities of the poor, conservative analysts argued
that the existence of welfare itself created, sustained, and
deepened poverty. Influential accounts written by George Gilder
(1981) and Charles Murray (1984) argued that the availability
of welfare to meet basic needs created disincentives to work
and to traditional nuclear family formation and provided a rational
calculus for dependency and anti-social behaviors such as nonmarital
childbearing.
These arguments were embraced
without reservation by Republican strategists, and they became
a centerpiece in the drive to gain Republican control of Congress.
The widely publicized Contract with America (Gingrich 1994:67)
provided a blueprint for the campaign and future legislation:
More than twenty-five years later, Johnson's War on Poverty
has been an unqualified failure. Despite spending trillions
of dollars, it has had the unintended consequence of making
welfare more attractive than work to many families, and once
welfare recipients become dependent on public assistance, they're
caught in the now-familiar welfare trap.
Nevertheless, the charge of
dependency was not limited to conservative analysis. Increasingly,
researchers and policy analysts with liberal identification
adopted welfare dependency as the principle problem of the welfare
system. For example, Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood (1994),
poverty analysts who became the primary architects of Clinton
administration welfare policy, conflate poverty and dependency,
accepting the conservative diagnosis of the problem, but substituting
government programs to make work pay for the free market and
laissez-faire approaches advocated by the right (Epstein 1997).
And even from the opposite end of the political spectrum, feminist
theorists also found fault with the welfare system for cultivating
dependency among its recipients, although their diagnosis differed
markedly in the forms and sources of the problem. They were
particularly vocal in arguing that the welfare system creates
a system of public patriarchy that substitutes impersonal, public
control of women by the state for the more direct private control
of family and male kin (Abramovitz 1988, Brown 1981, Fraser
1990, Tickamyer 1995-96). This is the sense in which welfare
bureaucracies continue to position women in the role of dependent.
As Kathy Ferguson comments: "Clients, in other words, are required
to adopt the strategies of femininity to ensure survival, just
as women have traditionally done...The feminization of the client
follows from the structural requirements of the client role,
because the only posture permissible toward the bureaucracy
is one of dependency" (Ferguson 1984:45).
With superficial consensus
about the nature of the problem if not its causes and solutions,
at the extremes of the political spectrum, it is not surprising
that there was such widespread agreement that welfare programs
required reform. Most analysts agree that the prevailing definition
of reform policies came from the right, but was widely ratified
by center and center-left politicians, bolstered by extensive
popular support for change.
Models of Public Policy: Carrot and Stick
Most debate over poverty policy
centers on a highly partisan and ideological approach to locating
causes of poverty as a prelude to proposing solutions. Individual
incapacity, cultural deviance, or structural barriers are each
identified and hotly defended as the primary source of poverty
and thus the most appropriate target for public policy. These
debates have been raging for decades, and a very large and multi-layered
literature has accumulated, not only to advocate one or another
of these approaches but also to analyze the discourse that fuels
these debates in both political and academic arenas (Epstein
1997, Handler and Hasenfeld 1997, Schram 1995).
Despite the enormous differences
in ideologies and the types of theoretical and empirical supports
marshaled, a common thread unites many of these approaches.
In particular, most models assume individual rationality as
the basic premise of human behavior. Programs are criticized
for their failure to provide appropriate incentives for valued
behavior (labor force participation, traditional family formation,
avoidance of substance abuse) or sanctions for deviance from
mainstream norms and values. Thus a conservative analyst such
as Murray (1984) points to the "moral hazards" of welfare as
the inducement for dependency. And The Contract states:
Republicans understand one important thing ignored by most Democrats
-- incentives affect behavior. Currently, the federal government
provides young girls the following deal: Have an illegitimate
baby and taxpayers will guarantee you cash, food stamps, and
medical care, plus a host of other benefits. As long as you
stay single and don't work, we'll continue giving you benefits
worth a minimum of $12,000 per year ($3,000 more than a full-time
job paying a minimum wage). It's time to change the incentives
and make responsible parenthood the norm and not the exception.
(Gingrich 1994:75)
The claim that behavior is
a product of a simple benefit calculation undergirds liberal
prescriptions as well. Bane and Ellwood (1994) focus on a rational
choice model that makes welfare more desirable than work when
work doesn't pay. The individual in both approaches is a rational
actor, calculating how to maximize opportunity, even in a system
that supplies limited options. If the incentives are perverse,
it is only reasonable that a rational actor will act accordingly.
This assumption of individual,
economic rationality increasingly was reflected in the criticisms
of existing welfare provision and in the specifics of reform
proposals. Although by no means the only assumption and value
embedded in these policies (others included the value of free
market mechanisms and traditional patriarchal family forms,
reliance on private rather than public sectors, and distrust
of centralized government intervention), all politically viable
welfare reform proposals called for changes that entailed a
system of rewards for work and self-sufficiency and punishment
for dependency and deviance. Whether emphasizing the carrot
of making work pay and providing programs to enhance employability
or the stick of time limits and sanctions for failure to adhere
to social and program rules, norms, and values, reform policies
purported to embody a commitment to a behavioral model that
focused on individual rationality and utility maximization.
The final version of welfare
reform devolved responsibility to the states for design and
implementation of specific programs, but required lifetime limits
on eligibility and specific goals for removing recipients from
welfare rolls and into employment. In Ohio, under a plan called
Ohio Works First (OWF), a 36 month lifetime limit was adopted,
stringent work requirements were imposed, but major responsibility
for specific program design and implementation was further devolved
to the counties. Counties vary in the types of measures they
have adopted and in their capacity to meet the requirements
of reform measures.
Research Issues
In this study, we examine welfare
recipients' understanding of the rationale and implementation
of welfare reform by analyzing results of focus groups and group
interviews with women on welfare conducted in four poor rural,
Appalachian Ohio counties. The purpose is to see if program
assumptions of rational choice and utility maximization are
reflected in participants' understanding of the operation of
the welfare system and the changes introduced under welfare
reform.
Research Design
Data for this study come from
four focus groups conducted from the winter of 1998 through
the summer of 1999, with program participants in four rural,
Appalachian counties, selected for their high levels of poverty
but varying capacities to implement welfare reform. The focus
group data reported in this research are part of a larger study
of the impacts of welfare reform and devolution in poor rural
counties of Appalachian Ohio. The larger study examines three
populations most closely affected by welfare reform: program
participants, human service agencies, and local employers using
a combination of existing statistics, administrative records
and primary data collection consisting of focus groups, surveys,
and in-depth interviews. The research was designed to provide
extensive sources of qualitative data from each of the participating
groups in order to have adequate opportunity to discover the
subjective meaning of these changes from a "bottom up" perspective,
rather than imputing or imposing them from above (Reinharz 1992,
Schram 1995). Focus groups with program participants in the
four counties under scrutiny were used both to supply insight
into the meaning of welfare reform for the primary targets of
the reform legislation and to provide initial input into the
design of the study, to help identify key issues to be explored
further with in-depth interviews and survey data.
Focus groups consisted of three
to seven women, who volunteered to participate at the request
of human service agency officials. In each instance, they were
conducted on the premises of the agency by two of the co-PIs
from the larger research project, without interference or participation
of agency personnel after initial solicitation. Each session
lasted approximately 1 and ½ hours and was tape-recorded. Participants
were assured of confidentiality and their right to turn off
the tape recorder or terminate participation at any time. The
recordings were transcribed verbatim and have been examined
by both the two investigators present at the focus groups and
by the two other researchers affiliated with the project.
Although the groups could in
no way be considered a random selection from program participants,
the variation in their material circumstances, future expectations,
and the issues they raised provide wide-ranging views of how
the welfare programs are perceived. These views will be put
to the test in the in-depth interviews and surveys that are
currently being collected. This paper reports preliminary findings
from these focus groups.
Findings
Although many different topics
were explored, four themes that are particularly relevant to
the research issues investigated in this paper emerge from the
discussions carried out in the focus groups. These are:
1. vagueness and uncertainty
about welfare reform purposes, goals, outcomes;
2. failure to see any logic
to sanctions;
3. distinctions made between
deserving vs undeserving mirrors larger culture;
4. allegiance to children,
family, and dependents not to society, or system.
Each of these will be examined
in turn. Taken together they build a case for the failure of
programs to operate in a manner that appears consistent and
rational to program participants and thus to follow the model
of economic rationality that they theoretically espouse.
Purposes of Welfare Reform
Focus group participants varied
in their willingness and ability to identify the overall meaning
or specific components of welfare reform with degree of knowledge
closely associated with degree of affiliation with the human
service agencies. Many professed to know little and to have
thought less about it, although typically, as the discussions
proceeded more information emerged. In the words of one woman,
"I've never really had time to think about it. I mean always
working, taking care of kids." And when pressed further to say
what comes to mind about welfare reform, she responded with
an emphatic "nothing." Another woman in the same group, equally
succinctly, expressed disdain: "I think it stinks." Almost as
expressive were the silences that met the question with few
women showing interest in expressing an opinion. It is unlikely
that this reluctance was the result of any fear or apprehension,
given the great willingness of most of these same women to expound
at length on perceived problems and criticisms. Rather it appears
to be a combination of lack of detailed knowledge and interest
on their part.
The exceptions to this pattern
occurred among women who were closely affiliated with the human
service agency as workers rather than just as recipients. In
one of the focus groups, there were participants who had met
mandatory work requirements by doing clerical working in the
agency, and who had then moved on to some sort of regular employment
in either that agency or an affiliated private service organization.
In these cases there was greater knowledge of changes and in
some cases, willingness to identify the goals of welfare reform.
As one woman stated:
...I think what it means is they're trying to do something better
with it. Trying to help people get on jobs instead of havin
ta live month and month on a certain amount of benefits. Trying
to have em get employment.
Other women in this group went
on to describe specific aspects of the changes, indicating specific,
detailed knowledge of program requirements and justifications
at odds with the lack of responses from the women in other focus
groups.
Similarly, there was one woman
in a different group who also was connected to the local human
service agency and ultimately went to work for it. This woman,
who seemed to assume the role of spokesperson and mediator for
other participants, had a clear opinion of welfare reform, but
in her case it was mostly negative.
I think there's gonna be a lot of people out on the street that
don't have any way to feed their kids and house their kids,
because you've only got 36 months, and it's down to 24, less
than 24 months now, and once that 24 months is over there goes
all their cash assistance. Others in this group then indicated
agreement with this assessment and one woman contributed additional
details and examples.
One other reaction is notable.
In one focus group, the only direct response took the form of
turning the question of what welfare reform means to you around
to comment on agency performance:
My thing is I sometimes wonder if they (people that set the
rules for the welfare system) actually know what it means. I
mean I think that they actually spend more money out as a waste
then they actually do to help somebody.
Later on, another woman in
this group volunteered an opinion that reflects on the general
attitude about welfare:
You should do something for what they give you. I'm not saying
for them to hand it out to you free. But I'm saying, there's
got to be a line to where they can say your kids aren't gonna
eat tonight.
Sanctions
Disinterest in the overall
contours of welfare reform contrasts with widespread concern
over specific sanctions and the vagaries of the sanctioning
system. Sanctions are reductions or suspensions in cash benefits
administered as punishment when program participants are believed
to have violated rules of participation or comportment. Typical
examples of situations that resulted in sanctions identified
by focus group members usually involved missing or being late
for appointments and work requirements. In one case a woman
who had a pregnant teenage daughter, also receiving assistance,
was threatened with sanctions when her daughter missed school.
It was not at all clear whether
participants identify sanctions as an aspect of reform, although
some spontaneously made the connection, but they do worry and
chafe over perceived arbitrariness and injustice in their application.
Sanctions were spontaneously brought up in all groups, and numerous
stories were offered to demonstrate their lack of fairness and
inexplicability. Stories included accounts of emergency illness,
transportation breakdowns, family crises, and even communication
failures that made it impossible to meet agency determined obligations
or to notify anyone at the time of the problem. In a number
of cases, stories were paired with other examples in which violators
in similar circumstances were seen to have escaped sanction
when the narrator had no such luck or thought that in similar
circumstances she wouldn't. As one woman says, "... there's
other people that I've seen missed days after days after days
after days, and if that's me, my butt would be sanctioned, that
would be it." Although there is no way of knowing the truth
or frequency of these events, they clearly illustrate participant
perceptions of an unfair and often arbitrary system of sanctions.
Arbitrary use of sanctions
appears to be part of a larger pattern in which recipients claim
only partial knowledge of the system and opportunities offered
and little sense of how to acquire more. An animated discussion
on the topic by five members of one focus group demonstrates
the frustration.
Karen: N, they don't tell you nothing unless you see it posted
somewhere then, you know, if you see it posted, then you can
ask and they'll probably tell you but they just don't come out
and...
Anna: They don't volunteer the information. They don't have
time to do it. They do but they don't.
Helen: Or they just don't care.
Melanie: They don't care...
Stella: They probably don't have time 'cause they're, I think
this place is all screwed up, ain't it?
After more discussion Stella continues:
Heck, I had like three caseworkers and I was getting all kinds
of letters and none of them were true. One letter I would get
saying ... something's wrong and I'm gonna lose my Medicaid
and then I'll call in and find out what's going on and they'll
send me another one saying well, now you're eligible and then
at the bottom of the thing it says well you ain't eligible and
I'm like, whatever.... I've been going through this for like
three months. Every month I have something wrong, don't I?
Deserving Versus Undeserving
The sense that the system is
often arbitrary and unfair gets expressed in a surprising and
somewhat inconsistent context by many focus group participants
when discussing differences among program participants. To some
degree, each group independently and without prompting made
distinctions between deserving and undeserving recipients. Sometimes
these emerged in the form of stories of persons they knew who
got away with cheating or other suspect behavior that they personally
disavowed. In other cases it was more hypothetical. Either way,
although they did not use the terms "deserving" and "undeserving,"
the stories and examples closely mirrored the meanings of these
classifications widely found in both public opinion and policy
circles (Katz 1989). Employment was generally viewed as redemptive
while fraud, abuse, and general dependency were described with
strong disapproval and sometimes overtones of envy.
Stories of abuse covered misrepresentation
of family size (sometimes hyperbolic) to get access to cash,
food, and housing benefits ("You've got people out there claiming
their cats and their dogs as kids just to get more money"),
misuse of food stamps and medical cards, and especially disability
classification which is a high stake site of great contention
for many poor people, since it guarantees a certain level of
assistance with fewer strings attached. Instances of personal
or family member disability that had either failed to receive
adequate consideration by agency personnel or were still being
contested were contrasted with acquaintances who were perceived
to be malingering or to have less serious problems.
On a more positive note, work
was seen as desirable and beneficial, especially by those who
had jobs or who participated in education or training programs
that they viewed as promising real progress.
You see people that come in and thought that's the only way
they have to live, getting jobs and be more ...prouder of theirself
that they're not havin to come in there...because I think people
do feel a lot better when they are working. Women who perceived
that they were in make work programs or training for nonexistent
or dead end jobs expressed more concern and sometimes bitterness
over the lack of meaningful work.
I mean I agree...with some of the welfare reform. You know,
workin for what you get. I agree with that. But put us somewhere
where it's gonna do us some good. I have worked on a program
and my understanding was they were going to put you somewhere
to work that you were going to get training or some educational
field that was gonna do you good to help you get a job. Ah,
since I've been in the work field I've learned how to paint
high schools, I've learned how to sweep streets, I've learned
how to dig holes. You know, that's all I've learned.
Family First
Most welfare reform rhetoric
defined categories of "deserving versus undeserving and "responsible
versus irresponsible" in terms of employment and type of household,
thus automatically classifying the majority of single mothers,
unemployed welfare recipients as undeserving and irresponsible,
regardless of reason. Undeserving was synonymous with irresponsible,
thus the necessity for legislating "personal responsibility."
Yet responsible parenting and providing for family welfare was
a primary commitment of the women we interviewed, but one that
sometimes was at odds with the official view of these terms
and their perceptions of the realities of their limited choices
and opportunities. Thus, the final theme to be discussed here
is the women's allegiance to family and especially their children
that took precedence over most other considerations, including
employment, as demonstrated by the following exchange:
Gloria: If I had a choice between living in Columbus and working
making twenty bucks an hour and I had a choice to raise my kids
in a small town where I felt better about it and wasn't as scared,
I'd choose that small town in a heartbeat.
Lori: Yeah.
Wendy: I had a job in Columbus when we moved up here. I worked
at (a hospital)...and I was making $7.48 an hour but then we
moved up here and you know it was either quit my job you know
or ...get the kids in a safe environment....
Other respondents had similar stories. One respondent moved
from Columbus because:
Well, when you take the trash out at 12:00 noon and you no longer
make it in your door then six bullets go flying past your head,
that's when it's time to get out....And it got where he (her
son) couldn't even go outside and play without stray bullets
flying through the back yard and stuff so we had to get out.
Kids figured prominently in assessment of the future. As Helen
stated:
Because after while, I figure, after while there ain't gonna
be no welfare at all, they're gonna have everybody off welfare.
Then you're gonna see trouble. Well, there's gonna be even more
murdered for money, more banks broken in, even the stores broken
into. One way or another some of the people is going to get
food for their kids.
Later, the same theme continued in Anna's prediction:
I think they're gonna have to build more prisons in the state
of Ohio because there's gonna be a lot of people going to prison....because
anybody that gets a hoot about their kids is not gonna sit there
and watch their kids do without.... Or grandkids....
These hard choices and grim
speculations about the future illustrate the women's fears and
their priorities. Other more optimistic expressions of hopes
and expectations for their children also reinforce the sense
that women with children place the highest priority on providing
for their welfare. It is just that they perceive that pursuing
the welfare of their families is not always compatible with
PRWORA's conception of responsibility which puts primary emphasis
on labor force attachment.
It is worth noting here that
the conservative rhetoric which surrounded welfare reform often
invoked a very different understanding of responsible motherhood
for middle-class women than it did for welfare mothers. In the
case of middle-class motherhood such rhetoric held that it was
irresponsible to work full-time thereby neglecting one's primary
responsibility to the family. In the case of welfare motherhood
it was irresponsible not to work full-time thereby neglecting
one's primary responsibility as a wage-earner, a not surprising
double-bind. What is interesting is that often these women refused
to make the priority of family contingent upon their own status
in the labor force. If taking care of children or elder family
members required that they be home, that they perhaps even commit
welfare fraud (earning unreported money doing hair or babysitting
on the side for example) in order to make ends meet, they did
not understand themselves as welfare cheats. They understood
themselves as good mothers. It is just that the irrationality
of bureaucratic rationality requires that good mothers sometimes
cheat.
Discussion and Conclusions
None of the findings presented
here are particularly surprising or novel in themselves. Prior
studies of welfare populations also report strong support for
mainstream values of a work ethic and family loyalty as well
as confusion and distrust of the operation of welfare bureaucracies.
Taken together, however, they serve to illustrate the contradictions
embodied in the assumptions held by policy analysts and makers
and program designers and implementers about the operation of
the welfare system under reform. In particular, what appears
to be bureaucratic rationality from above--programs designed
to encourage and reward work and sanction behaviors that violate
the discipline perceived necessary for successful labor force
attachment--are seen as arbitrary, unfair, and capricious by
those who experience them. Similarly, assumptions of purely
rational calculation of economic interest on the part of recipients
are subverted by priorities that place economic interest after
larger assessments of family welfare and value.
Ironically, these same perceptions
that work at odds with welfare policy assumptions to subvert
the intentions of program designers also illustrate the depth
of welfare recipients' identification with the mainstream values
that are themselves in theory the goals of welfare policy and
programs. Family values, fear of crime and violence, condemnation
of dependency and fraud, support for a work ethic coupled with
respect for fairness and impartiality are central to these women's
world-view as much as any other group in American society. In
adhering to them, however, they frequently find themselves in
conflict with the operation of the agencies that are supposed
to help them realize these values. Following Fraser and Gordon
(1994), Schram (1995:5) states
The late-modern welfare state
can be said to be a set of managerial practices designed to
reform
poor persons therapeutically
so that they will respond to the right economic incentives.
But if the
incentives are inconsistent,
and the reforms are at odds with the incentives, then the policy
is
handicapped from the start.
Of course the results and interpretations
reported here cannot determine definitively the "objective"
circumstances of how welfare reform functions for these women.
What it does show is how the women on the receiving end of a
large-scale policy change perceive these changes, voices that
are rarely heard or acknowledged when policy is debated and
evaluated.
Policy Recommendations
If welfare reform is to succeed,
even by the terms of success as they have been defined in PRWORA,
the implementation of reforms must appear rational not only
to those who design programs but to those who implement them
and their clients. The devolution of authority to the state
and county level has given local bureaucrats and case managers
new discretion. The potential is there for such discretion to
be used to respond more appropriately to local needs. However,
our focus groups seem to indicate that clients rarely feel their
needs are understood by those within the welfare system as it
is currently organized.
Nancy Fraser (1990) develops
an account of the politics of needs interpretation in which
she argues that a top-down understanding of needs tends to produce
expert discourses restricted to specialized publics who do social
"problem solving" by invoking a therapeutic model. Here individuals
become "cases" and are positioned as passive potential recipients
of predefined services rather than as agents involved in interpreting
their needs and shaping their life conditions. But our work
suggests that if welfare reform is to succeed, again even as
reformers themselves understand success, reformers will have
to be responsive to needs as recipients themselves understand
them. The need for reliable transportation is an illustrative
case. Clients we interviewed repeatedly pointed to a lack of
reliable transportation as a primary obstacle to consistent
employment and also as a common source of sanctions that appeared
totally unfair and irrational to recipients with last minute
transportation failures. Case managers dealing with individual
clients often see transportation problems as excuses, however,
rather than real material obstacles to employment. But our interviews
suggest the problem is both real and pervasive. And a 1998 GAO
study confirms this as a persistent problem in rural areas with
57% of the rural poor are without automobiles and 66% of the
rural poor live in areas with no or negligible public transportation.
If departments of human services are to successfully implement
welfare to work programs, particularly in rural areas, they
must understand transportation as a fundamental need.
Addressing such needs is a
necessary first step if the incentive structure of welfare-to-work
programs is to successfully alter behavior. But such needs often
go unidentified, or aren't taken seriously. How do we foster
a more appropriate understanding of client needs? The view from
the bottom-up must inform the process of policy-making. Ideally,
this would require that recipients play some active role in
designing programs responsive to their needs. The design phase
in many states and counties, including those scrutinized here,
has already taken place without such participation. As clients,
Ferguson argues, they are always the dependent second sex. When
the poor are constructed as clients this limits their ability
to participate:
There is only one sort of 'demand'
that a poor person can ordinarily make upon a welfare agency,
and that is more adequately conceived of as a request , a plea
for help. One cannot demand to participate in decision-making,
to see a policy changed, or to redirect resources. In other
words, one cannot demand to be included as a participant in
the political process itself; to be a recipient is also to be
a spectator. (Ferguson 1984:145-46) If we are to democratize
the process of needs interpretation, recipients must be positioned
not merely as "clients" but also as citizens. As we move into
the evaluation phase, we have a second opportunity to consider
this bottom-up perspective. Making welfare reform successful
requires that one's status as client not be conceived as antithetical
to one's status as democratic citizen, that clients become participants
and not merely spectators in the shaping of their futures.
REFERENCES
Abromovitz, Mimi. 1988. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social
Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston:
South End Press.
Bane, Mary Jo and David Ellwood. 1994. Welfare Realities:
From Rhetoric to Reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Carol. 1981. "Mothers, Fathers and Children: From
Private to Public Patriarchy. Pp. 239-67 in Lydia Sargent
(ed.) Women and Revolution. Boston: South End Press.
Eden, Kathryn and Laura Lein. 1997. Making Ends Meet: How
Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation.
Epstein, William M. 1997. Welfare in America: How Social
Science Fails the Poor. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist
Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture. Pp.
199-225 in Gordon (ed.) Women the State, and Welfare.
Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. 1994. "A Genealogy of Dependency:
Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State." Signs 19 (Winter):328-29.
Gilder, George. 1981. Wealth and Poverty. New York: Basic
Books.
Gilligan, Carol. 1993. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard
University.
Gilliom, John. 1998. "Welfare Surveillance, Rights, and the
Politics of
Care: A Case Study of (Non)Legal (Non)Mobilization." Paper
prepared for Western Political Science Association, Los Angeles,
CA.
Gingrich, Newt. 1994. Contract with America. NY: Republican
National Committee.
Gordon, Linda (ed.) 1990. Women, the State and Welfare. Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Handler, Joel and Yeheskel Hasenfeld. 1997. We the Poor People:
Work, Poverty, and Welfare. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
Katz, Michael B. 1996 (revised edition, originally 1986).
In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare
in America. New York: Basic Books.
_____. 1989. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty
to the War on NY: Pantheon Books.
Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy
1950-1980. NY: Basic Books.
Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research.
NY: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, Anne and Helen Ingram. 1993. "Social Construction
of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy."
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Schram, Sanford. 1995. Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social
Science and the Social Science of Poverty. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Sevenhuijsen, Selma. 1998. Citizenship and the Ethic of Care:
Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics.
New York: Routledge.
Tickamyer, Ann R. 1995-96. "Public Policy and Private Lives:
Social and Spatial Dimensions of Women's Poverty and Welfare
Policy in the United States." Kentucky Law Journal 84 (4):721-44.
Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument
for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
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