Download or read book The New Politics Of Poverty written by Lawrence M. Mead and published by . This book was released on 1992-05-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial look at how the failure of most of the poor to work at all has transformed American politics, by a New York University political scientist who is a leading advocate of workfare programs.
Download or read book The Poverty of American Politics written by H. Mark Roelofs and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clashes between these perspectives in the political system's institutional processes brew, according to the author, "generous portions of bombast and hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption, and all too often, violence in one form or another." He demonstrates why, with our present political structure, there is no possibility of achieving our goals. The system's ultimate poverty, he argues, is its congenital inability to comprehend, let alone reform, itself. No other book has viewed the ills of American politics so comprehensively or traced their sources so insistently to the system's theoretical design, to the character of its founding principles, and to the nature of its major institutions. With the Bicentennial of the Constitution as well as the recent collapse of Eastern European communism, many Americans are proudly proclaiming that their system of government works, despite its obvious contradictions, chaos, and corruption.
Download or read book Why Americans Hate Welfare written by Martin Gilens and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor. "With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now homeless, Gilens's book is must reading if you want to understand how the mainstream media have helped justify, and even produce, this state of affairs." —Susan Douglas, The Progressive "Gilens's well-written and logically developed argument deserves to be taken seriously." —Choice "A provocative analysis of American attitudes towards 'welfare.'. . . [Gilens] shows how racial stereotypes, not white self-interest or anti-statism, lie at the root of opposition to welfare programs." -Library Journal
Download or read book Poor Representation written by Kristina C. Miler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poor are grossly underrepresented in Congress both overall and by individual legislators, even those who represent high-poverty districts.
Download or read book The Poverty of American Politics written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic analysis challenges America's complacency about its political system.
Download or read book Poor Representation written by Kristina C. Miler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tens of millions of Americans live in poverty, but this book reveals that they receive very little representation in Congress. While a burgeoning literature examines the links between political and economic inequality, this book is the first to comprehensively examine the poor as a distinct constituency. Drawing on three decades of data on political speeches, party platforms, and congressional behavior, Miler first shows that, contrary to what many believe, the poor are highly visible to legislators. Yet, the poor are grossly underrepresented when it comes to legislative activity, both by Congress as a whole and by individual legislators, even those who represent high-poverty districts. To take up their issues in Congress, the poor must rely on a few surrogate champions who have little district connection to poverty but view themselves as broader advocates and often see poverty from a racial or gender-based perspective.
Download or read book The New Politics Of Poverty written by Lawrence M. Mead and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1993-07-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, the great national debate was how to help ordinary, workaday Americans achieve the good things in life. Today, we are preoccupied with—and increasingly divided over—how to cope with the problems of poor and dependent Americans, most of whom cannot or will not work at the jobs available. Mead provides overwhelming and disturbing evidence that passive poverty—the failure of most of the poor to work at all—reflects defeatism more than lack of opportunity. In this controversial book, Mead proposes concrete steps to overcome the inertia of the nonworking poor trapped in the welfare system. If the poor return to work, he suggests, American politics would focus once again on the problems of the working Americans.
Download or read book Class Attitudes in America written by Spencer Piston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich are widespread, and they influence Americans' political preferences.
Download or read book Poverty of Democracy written by Claudio A. Holzner and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political participation rates have declined steadily in Mexico since the 1990s. The decline has been most severe among the poor, producing a stratified pattern that more and more mirrors Mexico’s severe socioeconomic inequalities. Poverty of Democracy examines the political marginalization of Mexico’s poor despite their key role in the struggle for democracy. Claudio A. Holzner uses case study evidence drawn from eight years of fieldwork in Oaxaca, and from national surveys to show how the institutionalization of a free-market democracy created a political system that discourages the political participation of Mexico’s poor by limiting their access to politicians at the local and national level. Though clean elections bolster political activity, Holzner shows that at the local level, and particularly in Mexico’s poorest regions, deeply rooted enclaves of authoritarianism and clientelism still constrict people’s political opportunities. To explain this phenomenon, Holzner develops an institutional theory in which party systems, state-society linkages, and public policies are the key determinants of citizen political activity. These institutions shape patterns of political participation by conferring and distributing resources, motivating or discouraging an interest in politics, and by affecting the incentives citizens from different income groups have for targeting the state with political activity. Holzner’s study sheds light on a disturbing trend in Latin America (and globally), in which neoliberal systems exacerbate political and economic disparities and create institutions that translate economic inequalities into political ones.
Download or read book What Government Can Do written by Benjamin I. Page and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-04-15 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time, Page and Simmons show how even more could be - and should be - accomplished."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Poverty Knowledge written by Alice O'Connor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy. Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide. The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.
Download or read book Poverty Of Amer Pol 2Nd Ed written by H. Roelofs and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this forceful and original work in American political philosophy, H. Mark Roelofs challenges America's complacency about its politics. He maintains that the theoretical design of the American political system is inherently flawed. He sees the system as essentially split between its social democratic, egalitarian, legitimizing self-image and its liberal democratic, elitist, operational practice. Neither of these aspects of the system is politically productive beyond its immediate functions. Roelofs's devastating and closely reasoned critique traces our nation's political ills to fundamental flaws in the very design of its founding principles, the character of its major institutions, and the basic patterns of its processes. Roelofs traces the contradictions in our political culture to American adaptations of a profoundly religious, mostly Protestant individualism and a secular Bourgeois individualism rooted in Hobbes and Locke. The clashes between these perspectives in the political system's institutional processes brew, according to the author, "generous portions of bombast and hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption, and all too often, violence in one form or another". He demonstrates why, with our present political structure, there is no possibility of achieving our goals. The system's ultimate poverty, he argues, is its congenital inability to comprehend, let alone reform, itself. No other book has viewed the ills of American politics so comprehensively or traced their sources so insistently to the system's theoretical design, to the character of its founding principles, and to the nature of its major institutions. With the Bicentennial of the Constitution as well as the recentcollapse of Eastern European communism, many Americans are proudly proclaiming that their system of government works, despite its obvious contradictions, chaos, and corruption. Roelofs lucidly but pessimistically contends that, unless the system is fundamentally and completely reformed, it will continue to breed hypocrisy and inefficiency, violence and military adventurism, and a systematically impoverished democratic politics.
Download or read book Poverty and Power written by Douglas R. Imig and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Poverty and Power] provides an unusual study of the politics of the poor during the 1980s. . . . An account we need."-Frances Fox Piven, coauthor with Richard A. Cloward of Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare and Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. "An altogether exemplary work that adds much to our understanding of the links between institutional and non-institutional politics."-Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer. During the 1980s the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. In 1981 alone, 70 percent of the $35 billion cut from the federal budget came from programs for the poor. Although the disparity in incomes has been widely reported, the efforts of antipoverty activists and groups combating the Reagan/Bush agenda have largely been overlooked. Poverty and Power follows the rise, decline, and partial resurgence of poor Americans' representation from the War on Poverty to the Reagan Revolution. Drawing on personal interviews and financial reports, Douglas R. Imig examines the political activity and organizational crises of antipoverty groups including the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, the Food Research and Action Center, the Community Nutrition Institute, Bread for the World, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Children's Defense Fund. His findings delineate how electoral policy and economic change in the 1980s posed a direct threat to the welfare of the poor, and suggest reasons why no massive mobilization for social justice emerged. Still, the dogged efforts of advocates and activists culminated in the passage of the 1987 McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the first positive federal intervention into domesticsocial policy since the Reagan inauguration. Imig helps us understand the complex relationships between opportunity and action that characterize all social movements. Douglas R. Imig is an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty written by David Brady and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 937 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.
Download or read book Relational Poverty Politics written by Victoria Lawson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States). The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places. Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots. Contributors: Antonádia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.
Download or read book The Myth of Marginality written by Janice E. Perlman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wealth Poverty and Politics written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe. Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.