The Political Act of Public Talk: How Legislators Justified Welfare Reform

Abstract

Prior to the creation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, federal legislation primarily positioned mothers in the private sphere of parenting and men in the public sphere of work. Welfare reform changed this citizenship construction dramatically, requiring mothers to work but failing to acknowledge their caretaking responsibilities. This article presents a discourse and content analysis of the welfare reform debate that directly referenced citizenship. Findings suggest that legislators emphasized paid work as a citizenship activity while rarely portraying parenting as such. Furthermore, legislators' endorsement of paid work as a duty of citizenship, and the manner in which they paired this endorsement with the minimizing of parenting as such a duty, may have further diminished the perception of parenting as a valuable citizenship activity. Welfare reform may have been possible because the heretofore recognized citizenship work of mothering was largely ignored in the congressional debate.

Refugee Resettlement Policy in an Era of Neoliberalization: A Policy Discourse Analysis of the Refugee Act of 1980

“…Analyses of policy discourse play a key part in social welfare scholarship, revealing the ways in which language and ideas about poverty, welfare recipients, and policy processes may shape policy and thus become embedded in practice (Curran 2002;Toft 2010;Brown 2013). Discourse analyses, and qualitative approaches more generally, can illustrate meaning-making, or the battling over meaning that frames and then advances policy (Toft 2010;Brown 2013) and institutional and organizational behavior (Moylan and Lindhorst 2015). The concept of intertextuality describes how discourse, as it is represented in text in one policy arena, such as welfare, or in one field or in broader discourse, can be absorbed, borrowed, and subsumed in another field (Kristeva 1986;Bertrand 2016).…”

“…Critical discourse analysis, as a specific theoretical and methodological approach to studying discourse, examines "the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context" (VanDijk 1998, 352). Main tenets of critical discourse analysis include a focus on ideology, history, social problems, and power relations and the interpretative and explanatory basis of the approach (Hartwig 2006;Toft 2010). Implied in this approach is an explicit critical position or perspective, which thus differentiates it from other forms of methodological and analytical approaches to policy analysis (i.e., quantitative and qualitative analyses of outcomes, cost-benefit analyses, case and comparative studies; Wilson 2003;Hartwig 2006).…”

“…Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994), meanwhile, trace the genealogy of the word dependency as a key word in the welfare state. Jessica Toft (2010) and Hana Brown (2013) focus on work and dependency in their discourse analyses of legislators' justification for welfare reform and racialized stereotypes of welfare recipients, respectively.…”

“…This gap presents critical issues. Welfare policies have been extensively examined as consolidating market-based logic in specific forms and thus compromising the full citizenship of vulnerable Americans (Bourdieu 1998;Wacquant 2009;Toft 2010;Soss et al 2011;Katz 2013;Woolford and Nelund 2013). Without a similar theoretical framing, refugee policy escapes critical analyses that may specify the same market-oriented processes at work and similar negative consequences for refugees.…”

The New Racial Politics of Welfare: Ethno-Racial Diversity, Immigration, and Welfare Discourse Variation

“…Past studies reveal longstanding and contentious battles over the meaning and consequences of welfare use (Curran 2002;Fraser and Gordon 1994;Haney and March 2003;Little 1999;Mink 1996; Neubeck and Cazanave 2001;Toft 2010). For much of the 20 th century, welfare discourse largely depicted poverty as an individual flaw rather than a result of structural inequality (Gordon 1994;Mink 1996;Weir 1990), bolstering a welfare system that relegated poor ethnoracial minorities to the weakest social programs while preserving a more generous safety net for white male workers (Lieberman 1998).…”