Senior citizens don’t hesitate to speak up for their Social Security benefits. Why don’t poor people flock to the polls to make known their opinions on welfare? The answer lies partly in how they are treated by the welfare system itself.
“Your experience in interacting with government programs affects how you think about yourself and how you think about yourself as a citizen,” says Sarah Bruch, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “And that can affect your civic participation and your political participation, whether that’s voting or contacting your representative or participating in a march or a demonstration.”
Not every program treats people the same way. Bruch and her coauthors took advantage of this fact to test the effect of a paternalistic approach to public aid. They looked at three different public assistance programs targeted at the poor: Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and public housing assistance. Head Start, a national program for low-income children, also “gives parents an opportunity to actually engage and participate in decision making in a very positive and what we call ‘incorporating’ way. Whereas a program like TANF has been notorious since at least the mid- 1990s as more of a paternalistic or authoritarian type of interaction,” says Bruch. “It’s not ‘incorporating,’ in the sense that people don’t feel they have a say in the decisions that are being made about them.”
Public housing, the third program, serves as a neutral case in the study. “In many cases, you don’t even have to go into an office to apply for public housing benefits,” says Bruch. “It’s very bureaucratic, and you don’t have a lot of interactions with officials,” so the researchers did not expect participation in public housing assistance to affect civic and political engagement. In the study, the researchers took numerous factors into account, including crises such as substance abuse, domestic violence, and eviction, as well as specific social, economic, and political factors.
Bruch and her coauthors found that Head Start increased people’s participation in their communities, that TANF decreased civic and political participation, and that public housing had no effect. Then they went further. Because some states designed their TANF programs to be more directive and punitive than others, the researchers compared different degrees of paternalism. Sure enough, in the states that have shorter time limits, family caps, stronger work requirements, and harsher sanctions, participants were significantly less likely to engage in any civic or political activities.
Under such paternalistic authority relations, “you can only feel angry, you can’t feel proud,” says Frances Fox Piven, distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and coauthor of Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. But a person is more than the sum of her public assistance programs. “People draw resources not just from the benefit programs with which they are engaged, but also from other parts of their environment,” Piven says. “They are not just putty shaped by institutions.”
Sarah K. Bruch, Myra Marx Ferree, and Joe Soss, “From Policy to Polity: Democracy, Paternalism, and the Incorporation of Disadvantaged Citizens,” American Sociological Review, 75, 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.