TY - JOUR
T1 - Redefining compassion to reform welfare
T2 - How supporters of 1990s US federal welfare reform aimed for the moral high ground
AU - Stryker, Robin
AU - Wald, Pamela
N1 - Funding Information:
Robin Stryker is at the Department of Sociology and the Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. Email: rstryker@email.arizona.edu. Pamela Wald is at the Marketing Department, University of the Sciences, Philadelphia. Email: wald0137@umn.edu. The National Science Foundation (SES-0527035) and a University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship supported this wok. We contributed an earlier version of the article to the annual meetings of Research Committee 19 of the International Sociological Association, 8–10 September 2007, University of Florence, Florence, Italy. We also presented earlier versions at the Sociology Department Workshop, University of Minnesota, 30 January 2007, the Sociology Department, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 5 April 2007, the Sociology Department, University of Washington, Seattle, 25 April 2007, and the 19th Annual Meeting on Socio-Economics, Copenhagen Business School, 28–30 June 2007. We appreciate comments received in all these venues, including from Arturo Baiocchi, Elizabeth Boyle, Paul Burstein , Karl Dieter-Opp, Penny Edgell, Kathleen Hull, Doug Hartmann, Edgar Kiser, Ross Matsueda, Diana Pearce, Becky Pettit, Barbara Reskin, Joachim Savelsberg, Kate Stovel, Danielle Docka, and Nicholas Pedriana. We also gratefully acknowledge constructive comments received from Social Politics reviewers and from Ann Orloff and Bruno Palier, editors of this special issue . Authorship is alphabetical; the authors contributed equally to this paper. Inquiries should be addressed to Robin Stryker, rstryker@email.arizona.edu.
PY - 2009/11
Y1 - 2009/11
N2 - We use historical and content/discourse analyses to examine how the abstract, general value of compassion shaped debate over the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), ending entitlement to need-based public assistance in the United States. We find that a taken-for-granted compassionate American identity institutionalized as a social safety net helped constrain debate over ending entitlement, even as women's labor force participation and neo-liberal discourses were rising. But in the mid-1990s, Republican supporters of radical reform converted constraint into opportunity, redefining compassion to make it a positive resource for ending entitlement. Compassion so redefined conjoined with perversity rhetoric and negative attributions about welfare recipients to construct a moral map and logically coherent symbolic package promoting entitlement's end. "Conservative" US welfare reform, like "liberal" US affirmative action, is a case of policy and institutional change promoted through value redefinition. Multiple perspectives on the role of ideas, including background and foreground, and instrumental and constitutive, combine to explain why Republican leaders perceived the need to redefine compassion, and to account for the content and pattern of frames invoking compassion by Democrats and Republicans in Congressional debates over the PRWORA.
AB - We use historical and content/discourse analyses to examine how the abstract, general value of compassion shaped debate over the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), ending entitlement to need-based public assistance in the United States. We find that a taken-for-granted compassionate American identity institutionalized as a social safety net helped constrain debate over ending entitlement, even as women's labor force participation and neo-liberal discourses were rising. But in the mid-1990s, Republican supporters of radical reform converted constraint into opportunity, redefining compassion to make it a positive resource for ending entitlement. Compassion so redefined conjoined with perversity rhetoric and negative attributions about welfare recipients to construct a moral map and logically coherent symbolic package promoting entitlement's end. "Conservative" US welfare reform, like "liberal" US affirmative action, is a case of policy and institutional change promoted through value redefinition. Multiple perspectives on the role of ideas, including background and foreground, and instrumental and constitutive, combine to explain why Republican leaders perceived the need to redefine compassion, and to account for the content and pattern of frames invoking compassion by Democrats and Republicans in Congressional debates over the PRWORA.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=72749086040&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=72749086040&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/sp/jxp022
DO - 10.1093/sp/jxp022
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:72749086040
SN - 1072-4745
VL - 16
SP - 519
EP - 557
JO - Social Politics
JF - Social Politics
IS - 4
ER -