IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v577y2001i1p49-65.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Success Stories: Welfare Reform, Policy Discourse, and the Politics of Research

Author

Listed:
  • Sanford F. Schram

    (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College)

  • Joe Soss

    (American University and author of Unwanted Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System)

Abstract

Welfare reform is now widely hailed as a success. In this article, the authors analyze this public verdict as a political construction. During the 1980s and 1990s, welfare discourse shifted to emphasize concerns over program dependency. This shift not only promoted policy retrenchment, it also defined the terms on which retrenchment would be judged. Specifically, it established caseload levels and studies of program "leavers" as a common frame of reference for judging welfare reform. This article presents evidence that a majority of media stories on welfare reform from 1998 to 2000 offered positive assessments. The authors then show that perceptions of reform as a policy success depend chiefly on the diversion of attention away from standards of evaluation and interpretations of evidence that might suggest failure. They conclude by discussing how the construction of policy success is likely to affect upcoming debates over the renewal of welfare reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Sanford F. Schram & Joe Soss, 2001. "Success Stories: Welfare Reform, Policy Discourse, and the Politics of Research," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 577(1), pages 49-65, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:577:y:2001:i:1:p:49-65
    DOI: 10.1177/000271620157700105
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271620157700105
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/000271620157700105?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:mpr:mprres:2635 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Denton R. Vaughan & Barbara A. Haley & Aref N. Dajani, 2021. "Ten years later: Self‐sufficiency of welfare mothers before the Great Recession," Poverty & Public Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(2), pages 184-223, June.
    2. Denton R. Vaughan & Barbara A. Haley & Aref N. Dajani, 2020. "Trends Over Time in Employment for Mothers Who Received Welfare Benefits in 1996," Poverty & Public Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 12(3), pages 271-303, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:577:y:2001:i:1:p:49-65. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.