Welfare Reform in Illinois: Recent Efforts in the Context of the National Debate

This paper describes welfare reform in Illinois by placing the policy reform efforts in a much broader context, and showing how the larger picture helps us understand the role of values in the state policymaking process. It delineates the consensus approach to public assistance developed in the late 1960s, which called for a transfer of power from states to a federally financed system of welfare. This system provided for the aged, blind, disabled, and dependent children, as well as assistance in the form of child care for working mothers, and job training. The paper explores the national ideological and political factors from which policy efforts originated in Illinois, as well as its changing economic, and the political culture in which the state handled welfare reform. It brings its historic review into the present where responsibility for social welfare has once again shifted to the states. The paper concludes that Illinois's social welfare laws and programs have not been motivated by values of redistribution and egalitarianism. Instead it claims they have been molded by a conservative tradition that believes equalities produced by state policy constrain personal freedom and threaten economic growth because they weaken the economic incentives to work and to take undesirable jobs. The authors suggest that welfare be redefined so as to fit more easily within the business-oriented political culture of the state, and offer several recommendations for action.