Ending Welfare as We Know ItBill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993–94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short-term political and policy calculations by President Clinton and congressional Republicans—along with the cascade of repositioning by other policymakers—turned "ending welfare as we know it" from political possibility into policy reality. |
Contents
Introduction Welfare Reform as a Political and Policy Problem | 1 |
Welfare as We Knew It | 9 |
Poverty and American Families | 10 |
The Structure of American Family Support Policies | 11 |
Explaining Welfare Politics Context Choices Traps | 23 |
Contextual Forces in Welfare Reform Politics | 24 |
Analyzing Political Choice | 29 |
Policymaking Traps in Reforming Welfare | 43 |
The Ambiguous Impact of Groups | 217 |
Not Ending Welfare as We Know it The Clinton Administrations Welfare Reform Initiative | 222 |
The Political Environment for Welfare Reform | 223 |
A Crowded Agenda | 228 |
Policy Choice and the Politics of Formulation | 232 |
Coming to Closure | 237 |
The Clinton Administration Proposal | 242 |
The Political Feasibility of the Clinton Plan | 246 |
Stasis and Change in Welfare Policy | 52 |
The Past as Prologue | 54 |
Growing Controversy over AFDC | 55 |
Nixons Family Assistance Plan | 57 |
Carter Tries Again | 60 |
The Budget Blitzkrieg of 1981 | 66 |
The Family Support Act of 1988 | 70 |
Expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit | 78 |
Patterns and Lessons in Welfare Reform | 84 |
Avoiding the Welfare Reform Policymaking Traps | 91 |
Conclusions | 100 |
Welfare Reform Agendas in the 1990s | 102 |
The Problem Stream | 103 |
The Policy Stream | 106 |
The Political Stream | 126 |
Conclusions | 133 |
The Role of Policy Research | 135 |
The Boom in Policy Research | 140 |
From Program Exit to SelfSufficiency | 153 |
Policy Research and the Politics of Dissensus | 160 |
Public Opinion on Welfare Reform | 169 |
The Importance of Elite Priming | 171 |
Analyzing Opinion on Welfare | 172 |
Causes of Poverty and Welfare Dependence | 175 |
Attitudes toward Specific Reforms | 177 |
Whom Do You Trust? | 186 |
Conclusions and Implications | 190 |
Interest Groups and Welfare Reform | 196 |
Child Advocacy Groups | 199 |
The Democratic Leadership Council | 206 |
Intergovernmental Groups | 207 |
Social Conservative Groups | 211 |
Conclusions | 248 |
A New Congress a New Dynamic | 252 |
The Electoral Earthquake | 253 |
Initial Bids | 260 |
Seeking a Workable Compromise in the House | 274 |
Explaining the Republican Success in the House | 289 |
Stop and Go in the Senate | 294 |
Stop and Go | 301 |
A Fragile Republican Coalition | 303 |
Aftershocks | 313 |
Endgames and Aftershocks | 316 |
Bargaining Positions and Bargaining Rules | 317 |
The Budget Process and Initial Vetoes | 320 |
The Senate Bill and Gubernatorial Intervention | 321 |
Moving a Bill | 325 |
Provisions of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act | 328 |
Aftershocks | 335 |
Conclusions | 337 |
Gaining Ground? The New World of Welfare | 342 |
Declining Caseloads | 343 |
State Program Design | 344 |
Welfare Offices | 347 |
The Behavior of Welfare Recipients | 350 |
The LongTerm Prognosis | 352 |
Welfare Reform and the Dynamics of American Politics | 355 |
The Political Barriers to Comprehensive Welfare Reform | 359 |
Enacting Welfare Reform 199596 | 364 |
The Centrality of Choice | 382 |
Notes | 387 |
465 | |