Editor’s Note
This issue of Policy Currents is coming to you a few weeks later than originally planned. Perhaps this is just as well. Much has changed in America in the last few weeks. We still do not know with certainty how many people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But we do know that the lives of thousands of families, countless friends, and indeed all Americans were forever changed.
Our expectations about politics and the pressing public policy issues of the day were also fundamentally altered on September 11th. Prior to that date, it appeared that policy debates over the next several months would revolve mainly around the shrinking surplus and a slowing economy. Now those concerns have been transformed. Concerns about the surplus have vanished, and the economy, which before seemed to be merely slowing, now appears on the brink of a full-scale recession. More importantly, the policy space prior to September 11th was dominated by debates over education, environmental protection, the president’s faith-based initiatives, and hints about what now appear to have been fairly modest proposals to reform the military. Today, the policy space is filled with issues of war and threats of additional terrorist attacks, questions about the proper trade-offs between civil liberties and public safety, and proposals to bail out a growing contagion of industries that are suffering as a result of the hit to the nation’s economy.
Among the issues that had only begun to receive some notice prior to the September 11th attacks was the upcoming reauthorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 that will be on the legislative calendar during 2002. Not surprisingly, the issue of welfare reform hasn’t yet received any attention in the wake of the attacks. Yet, it will doubtless begin to gain attention as the unemployment rate rises and more families seek welfare assistance.
With this issue of Policy Currents, we begin with what I hope will be a longer running series of articles on welfare and what we in the field of public policy research have learned (or not learned) over the last several years that should inform upcoming debates on welfare reform. If you would be willing to write an article for this series on welfare reform, I would very much like to talk with you.
In this issue, we have two articles that describe the system of welfare that has developed in the years since the 1996 adoption of the PRWORA. The first article, by Mark Rom, offers a basic set of categories for understanding the politics of welfare prior to the 1996 welfare reforms and suggests that the welfare system since 1996 represents a third approach that draws on many of the precepts that were present in the too-often polarized debates leading up to that reform. Rom refers to this third approach as “Opportunity and Responsibility” that combines a commitment to providing assistance to the poor with an equally strong commitment to requiring participation in labor markets.
The second article, by Larry Mead, is a detailed analysis of the multiple aspects of welfare. Mead very usefully disentangles the various strands in the debates over welfare and its reform to show the complex set of motivations that were combined in PRWORA. In doing so, he highlights features of welfare reform that too often have gone unremarked, most importantly the extent to which welfare reform in its implementation has drawn from both conservative and liberal principles. In this regard, the article by Mead dovetails quite closely with that of Rom. One of the key issues raised in the Mead article is the question of how much of the decrease in welfare rolls across the country should be attributed to welfare reform itself and how much to other forces at work during the same period, forces that included a superb economy, better child support enforcement, a political climate that disfavored dependency, and more.
In this issue of the newsletter, we also have the final installment of results from the survey of Policy Section members that was conducted during the summer of 2000. In this installment, Brian Shoup discusses the books and articles that section members view as having the largest impact on policy studies. You will notice that the most significant work identified in the survey was also the winner of the Section’s Wildavsky award this year, namely Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones’ Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993).
Finally, let me encourage you to take advantage of the Policy Section’s website at www.APSAPolicySection.org. One change that you will want to be aware of is that we have created a new bulletin board for posting job announcements. This bulletin board is open to everyone. You do not need a userid or password to access the job announcement board. We are also in the process of adding several back issues of Policy Currents to the archive. Within the next several weeks, the archive will be almost complete, with only a handful of missing issues. As always, if you have suggestions or comments about the newsletter or the website, please drop me a note by email at kbickers@indiana.edu or give me a call at 812-855-4198.
Best regards, Ken Bickers
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