Download or read book Welfare Reform and Political Theory written by Lawrence M. Mead and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, both the United States and Britain shifted from entitlement to work-based systems for supporting their poor citizens. Much research has examined the implications of welfare reform for the economic well-being of the poor, but the new legislation also affects our view of democracy—and how it ought to function. By eliminating entitlement and setting behavioral conditions on aid, welfare reform challenges our understanding of citizenship, political equality, and the role of the state. In Welfare Reform and Political Theory, editors Lawrence Mead and Christopher Beem have assembled an accomplished list of political theorists, social policy experts, and legal scholars to address how welfare reform has affected core concepts of political theory and our understanding of democracy itself. Welfare Reform and Political Theory is unified by a common set of questions. The contributors come from across the political spectrum, each bringing different perspectives to bear. Carole Pateman argues that welfare reform has compromised the very tenets of democracy by tying the idea of citizenship to participation in the marketplace. But William Galston writes that American citizenship has in some respects always been conditioned on good behavior; work requirements continue that tradition by promoting individual responsibility and self-reliance—values essential to a well-functioning democracy. Desmond King suggests that work requirements draw invidious distinctions among citizens and therefore destroy political equality. Amy Wax, on the other hand, contends that ending entitlement does not harm notions of equality, but promotes them, by ensuring that no one is rewarded for idleness. Christopher Beem argues that entitlement welfare served a social function—acknowledging the social value of care—that has been lost in the movement towards conditional benefits. Stuart White writes that work requirements can be accepted only subject to certain conditions, while Lawrence Mead argues that concerns about justice must be addressed only after recipients are working. Alan Deacon is well to the left of Joel Schartz, but both say government may actively promote virtue through social policy—a stance some other contributors reject. The move to work-centered welfare in the 1990s represented not just a change in government policy, but a philosophical change in the way people perceived government, its functions, and its relationship with citizens. Welfare Reform and Political Theory offers a long overdue theoretical reexamination of democracy and citizenship in a workfare society.
Download or read book Welfare Reform and Political Theory written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States written by Mary Reintsma and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The welfare system in the United States underwent profound changes as a result of the groundbreaking welfare legislation passed in 1996 entitled The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States examines in detail the legislative process that gave rise to PRWORA and presents two alternative theories to explain this process; the traditional public interest model of government and the public choice model. On the basis of a detailed historical analysis of welfare programs and policies in the US, the author explains the two alternative theories and engages in a detailed institutional and statistical analysis to make a convincing argument for the validity of the public choice paradigm. Mary Reintsma s book reveals how the outcome of any legislation is highly dependent on the input of interest groups and the interactions of such groups with those responsible for passing the legislation. The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States will appeal to academics and researchers involved in public sector economics, public choice theory and welfare economics reform.
Download or read book The Politics of Welfare Reform written by Donald F. Norris and published by SAGE Publications, Incorporated. This book was released on 1995-04-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The case studies focus on the factors that motivated welfare reform, the political process that led to the adoption of the reforms, the objectives sought by the reforms, and an assessment of the likelihood that the reforms would achieve their objectives. Introductory and concluding essays knit together national trends in welfare reform and summarize results of recent evaluations of various reform proposals.
Download or read book From Rhetoric To Reform written by Anne Marie Cammisa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By framing the dilemma in American politics in terms of helping the poor or reducing dependency, this book examines the question of what government assistance can do. It explains why some people believe that focusing on dependency moves us away from the real problem of welfare reform.
Download or read book The Promise of Welfare Reform written by Elizabeth Segal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-05-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Find out how—and why—legislation has made economic rights more important than human rights Since 1996, politicians and public officials in the United States have celebrated the “success” of welfare reform legislation despite little, if any, evidence to support their claims. The Promise of Welfare Reform: Political
Download or read book Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform written by Sanford F. Schram and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.
Download or read book Welfare Reform and Beyond written by Isabel V. Sawhill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-05-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brookings Institution's Welfare Reform & Beyond Initiative was created to inform the critical policy debates surrounding the upcoming congressional reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and a number of related programs that were created or dramatically altered by the 1996 landmark welfare reform legislation. The goal of the project has been to take the large volume of existing and forthcoming research studies and shape them into a more coherent and policy-oriented whole. This capstone collection gathers twenty brief essays (published between January 2001 and February 2002) that focus on assessing the record of welfare reform, specific issues likely to be debated before the TANF reauthorization, and a broader set of policy options for low-income families. It is a reader-friendly volume that will provide policymakers, the press, and the interested public with a comprehensive guide to the numerous issues that must be addressed as Congress considers the future of the nation's antipoverty policies. The collection covers the following topics and features a new introduction from the editors: - An Overview of Effects to Date - Welfare Reform Reauthorization: An Overview of Problems and Issues - A Tax Proposal for Working Families with Children - Welfare Reform and Poverty - Reducing Non-Marital Births - Which Welfare Reforms are Best for Children? - Welfare and the Economy - What Can Be Done to Reduce Teen Pregnancy and Out-of-Wedlock Births? - Changing Welfare Offices - State Programs - Welfare Reform and Employment - Fragile Families, Welfare Reform, and Marriage - Health Insurance, Welfare, and Work - Helping the Hard-to-Employ - Sanctions and Welfare Reform - Child Care and Welfare Reform - Job Retention and Advancement in Welfare Reform - Housing and Welfare Reform - Non-Citizens - Block Grant Structure - Food Stamps - Work Support System - Possible Welfare Re
Download or read book Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation written by Anna Marie Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-09 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the political interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, Anna Marie Smith explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded within contemporary United States welfare policy. Presenting original legal research and drawing from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks, the author argues that these measures violate the rights of poor mothers. Drawing on several historical precedents the author shows that welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. The book concludes with a vigorous and detailed critique of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy.
Download or read book Learning from Leaders written by Carol S. Weissert and published by Rockefeller Institute Press. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Several Midwestern states have been leaders on welfare reform in the 1990s and have led the way for other states in implementing the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This book provides detailed analyses of the political rationales and processes that preceded the federal direction to states to dramatically alter their welfare programs and administrative systems. It discusses implementation choices as well as difficulties and successes in carrying out those choices. The book also analyzes the role of political parties, interest groups, foundations, think tanks, and academics in setting agendas and formulating policy. The book features chapters describing and analyzing welfare reform, both their development and implementation in five states—Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Download or read book Welfare written by Martin Anderson and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Welfare Consensus written by Darren Barany and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the conservative ideological and political attack on welfare in the United States. Winner of the 2019 Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award presented by the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association Families on welfare in the United States are the target of much public indignation from not only the general public but also political figures and the very workers whose job it is to help the poor. The question is, What explains this animus and, more specifically, the failure of the United States to prioritize a sufficient social wage for poor families outside of labor markets? The New Welfare Consensus offers a comprehensive look at welfare in the United States and how it has evolved in the last few decades. Darren Barany examines the origins of American antiwelfarism and traces how, over time, fundamentally conservative ideas became the dominant way of thinking about the welfare state, work, family, and personal responsibility, resulting in a paternalistic and stingy system of welfare programs. Darren Barany is Assistant Professor of Sociology at LaGuardia Community College, the City University of New York.
Download or read book Women and Welfare written by Nancy J. Hirschmann and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social welfare state has come under increasing pressure, raising serious doubts about its survival. This book represents an interdisciplinary, multimethodological and multicultural feminist approach ...
Download or read book Social Reproduction and the City written by Simon Black and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York’s unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services “on the cheap,” relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers’ need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers’ need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the “crisis of care,” social reproduction, and the neoliberal city. At a theoretical level, Simon Black’s history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.
Download or read book Reasons for Welfare written by Robert E. Goodin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1988-08-21 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Goodin passionately and cogently defends the welfare state from current attacks by the New Right. But he contends that the welfare state finds false friends in those on the Old Left who would justify it as a hesitant first step toward some larger, ideally just form of society. Reasons for Welfare, in contrast, offers a defense of the minimal welfare state substantially independent of any such broader commitments, and at the same time better able to withstand challenges from the New Right's moralistic political economy. This defense of the existence of the welfare state is discussed, flanked by criticism of Old Left and New Right arguments that is both acute and devastating. In the author's view, the welfare state is best justified as a device for protecting needy--and hence vulnerable--members of society against the risk of exploitation by those possessing discretionary control over resources that they require. Its task is to protect the interests of those not in a position to protect themselves. Communitarian or egalitarian ideals may lead us to move beyond the welfare state as thus conceived and justified. Moving beyond it, however, does not invalidate the arguments for constantly maintaining at least the minimal protections necessary for vulnerable members of society.
Download or read book The Possibility of Politics written by Stein Ringen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Possibility of Politics explores the power of political reform, specifically reform of the modern welfare state. Can reform be effective if limited to cautious and piecemeal interventions that avoid radicalism and revolution? Can it also avoid unwanted consequences? Will the welfare state survive in the future?Stein Ringen views the welfare state as a large-scale experiment in political reform. To ask if the welfare state works is to ask if political reform is possible at all. By its nature, the welfare state is reform on a grand scale, for it attempts to change the circumstances individuals and families live under without changing and disrupting society itself. But is it realistic to believe a population can get together, set goals and then try to meet these goals through collective actions, specifically public policies, without causing unintended consequences and destroying the state in the process? The welfare state attempts, idealistically, to redistribute welfare without reshaping the economic processes that cause inequities in the first place. Ringen considers how well redistribution has met the test in terms of political legitimacy, its intended effects on poverty and inequality, as well as its undesired and unintended effects on economic efficiency and the quality of private life. Ultimately, does the welfare state work? Further, is the welfare state a good thing?In considering these questions, The Possibility of Politics should be of particular value to academics and advanced students interested in political theory, public economics, social administration, and political sociology.Stein Ringen is professor of sociology and social policy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Green College. He teaches social and political theory and research methodology for graduates in social policy, sociology, politics, economic and social history and other subjects.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Welfare in America written by Glenn David Mackin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Social Welfare in America examines how politicians, theorists and citizens discuss need, welfare and disability with respect to theoretical and political projects. Glenn David Mackin argues that participants in these discussions often miss the way their perceptions of those in need shape their discourse. Professor Mackin also explores disability rights groups and welfare rights activism in the 1960s and 1970s to examine the ways that those designated as needy or incompetent often challenge these designations, thus making the issue of welfare an ongoing conflict over who counts as competent and generating new ways of understanding democracy and equality.
