The Divisive State of Social Policy

Bogue, Kelly

doi:10.46692/9781447350552

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“…The "Bedroom Tax," for instance, penalized social housing tenants deemed to under-occupy their property (Bogue 2019), while a new streamlined system of benefits called Universal Credit brought insecurities commonly associated with the market into the heart of the social state (Koch and Reeves 2021). Austerity policies have rightly been characterized as reductions in state-provided resources and support, often with disproportionate costs to women and ethnic minorities (Bogue 2019;Hall 2019). At the same time, however, and as we will show, such cutbacks have also involved an extension of the state's capacity to apply force in citizens' intimate lives.…”

Section: Authoritarianism Class and The Neoliberal Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meanwhile, so-called welfare reforms hit the most vulnerable populations the hardest. The "Bedroom Tax," for instance, penalized social housing tenants deemed to under-occupy their property (Bogue 2019), while a new streamlined system of benefits called Universal Credit brought insecurities commonly associated with the market into the heart of the social state (Koch and Reeves 2021). Austerity policies have rightly been characterized as reductions in state-provided resources and support, often with disproportionate costs to women and ethnic minorities (Bogue 2019;Hall 2019).…”

Section: Authoritarianism Class and The Neoliberal Statementioning

confidence: 99%

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Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Davey

Koch

2021

PoLAR

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In Britain, especially in the 2010s, neoliberal reform involved an extension of legal coercion into the domestic and community lives of marginalized citizens. On two postindustrial housing estates in Britain, working-class residents experience this "everyday authoritarianism" in areas that the liberal state typically constructs as private and purports to leave alone: the home and the intimate relations that frame it. Residents engage this legal coercion by adopting responses that range from defensive avoidance to co-opting officials to acts of vigilantism. By doing so, they negotiate the presence of an authority that is often out of sync with their own expectations for protection, and in some cases actively undermines their efforts to remain safe. Their pluralism can be framed neither in terms of an acceptance of state authority nor as a straightforward refusal to be governed. Rather, it reveals the contradictory ways in which marginalized citizens define their relationship to the state under contemporary conditions of class fragmentation. By adding detail on everyday life to meta-narratives of an authoritarian turn, this article theorizes the political potential and limits of people's daily engagements with the state for contesting the latter's authority. [class, coercion, liberal governance] Despite its ambitions of universal freedom, liberal governance has historically featured limits where it interfaces with authoritarian forms of rule. This is especially the case for those people deemed to lack the capacity for self-governance (Bennett, Dodsworth, and Joyce 2007). In Britain, class marks one such limit, along with-and intersecting with-gender and race. Liberal democracy not only historically enfranchised the propertyowning classes but also monitored, policed, and controlled working-class people in ways not known to their middle-class counterparts (Joyce 2013). Our fieldwork was conducted in the 2010s, with our focus on the recent period of British governance known as neoliberalism. In Britain, neoliberalism is generally seen as commencing in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and her policies of privatization, welfare retrenchment, and accumulation by dispossession. During this time, the state came to subject many working-class people to evermore open forms of coercion (

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Section: Authoritarianism Class and The Neoliberal Statementioning

confidence: 99%