Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics.

• Author: Tsai, Robert L.

The republic has welfare reform on its mind. On August 22, 1996, President Clinton, faced with an impending election and the daunting prospect of explaining a three-time veto in light of his past promises to remake welfare,(1) signed into law a bill that, among other things, devolves greater flexibility to the states and imposes sharp restrictions on the availability of AFDC.(2) Even the staunchest advocates of reform acknowledge that we have entered an era of uncertainty.(3) In Such a climate, Steven Teles's study, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics, enhances our collective understanding of AFDC's history and continues the national conversation about society's obligations to the poor.

Whose Welfare vividly describes the genesis of AFDC, the changes in the composition of the program and its recipients, and the various attempts at reform beginning in the 1960s. Eschewing the approach taken by consensus-based scholarship,(4) Teles insists that welfare politics represents a breakdown of the democratic decisionmaking process. He claims that welfare policy has not legitimately reflected popular sentiment over the last thirty years, and argues that this state of affairs is best explained by a theory of "elite dissensus."(5) Unfortunately, the study falls short in two respects. First, contrary to the author's claim, the political system has "worked"(6) by producing policy in tune with popular views. Notwithstanding the dramatic recent round of devolution of authority, it is the public as a whole, and not merely the elites, that remains deeply conflicted over welfare goals. Second, even if there were a disjunction between public sentiment and policy, this is best understood as characteristic of a healthy deliberative democracy.

Whose Welfare analyzes the actions of the cast of intellectuals who have been charged, whether by electoral process or by chance, with the responsibility of defining the contours of welfare policy. Teles's explanation is top-down by nature: Politicians, activists, and judges have prevented AFDC from evolving to reflect the prevailing views of the populace. As a first step, he argues that whereas AFDC's precursor, Aid to Dependent Children, originally was established in 1935 to supplement state programs designed to keep destitute widows out of the labor force, today eighty-five percent of the public supports requiring women with preschool children to work in order to receive public assistance (p. 55). As Teles asserts, "[t]he set of beliefs that formed the moral foundation for the mother's aid and Aid to Dependent Children programs has utterly collapsed" (p. 57).

Having explained that requiring work is a critical element of any legitimate form of welfare, Teles goes on to argue that reform has been frustrated by "elite dissensus," a system malfunction marked by a failure on the part of the political elite to "give form and structure to [the public's] preferences" (p. 165). He notes that, compared with the public at large, professional elites possess "well-constrained ideological structures" (p. 62). The more actively elites involve themselves in the social issues of the day, the more likely it is that extreme bipolar debate will occur (p. 74). Teles finds that welfare is particularly vulnerable to dissensus dynamics because the issue implicates "regime level consequences"(7) (p. 164), and because the poor have no direct representation in the political process but are spoken for by competing organizations (pp. 15, 16, 164). He avers that elite "disjunction" has characterized welfare politics since the 1960s. His portrait is of an America where "welfare dependency continued to rise" (p. 80), even as attempts to tie public assistance meaningfully to work requirements were foiled.

The author lays much of the blame squarely at the door of self-styled advocates of the poor, such as the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).(8) Rather than lobbying for legislative reform or assisting the poor to get off the rolls, the welfare movement sought to secure a guaranteed annual income. NWRO was instrumental in the derailment of Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a proposal supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Subsequent plans either failed or produced only cosmetic effects.(9) Political leaders, for their part, opted for the expedient practice of credit-claiming and risk-avoidance instead of seeking national reform: Successive administrations...