Setting the Welfare Agenda: a qualitative analysis of the reauthorization of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
Creators: name: Hamilton Lopez, Marianne
Publisher: name: Maryland Shared Open Access Repository
Year: 2014
Subjects: Agenda-setting
Poverty
Social Construction
Welfare

description: The 1996 passage of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was made possible by a unique confluence of factors including the work of organized political entrepreneurs, a bipartisan government, the negative construction of welfare recipients by elected officials, the public, and the media, and a booming economy. However, since the inception of TANF, the economic and political context has changed, likely affecting the agenda-setting stage for reauthorization of the legislation.  The debates about and actions regarding TANF reauthorization and/or the role of cash-assistance welfare in general occurs within the changing economic and political context at any given time. Using John Kingdon's multiple-streams agenda-setting theory, this study examined welfare discourse to analyze how the policy community viewed the role of TANF within the deep recession in the first decade of the twenty-first century and which specific factors have influenced the tone and direction of its reauthorization. The study also integrated review of social construction and the economy into the multiple-stream agenda-setting framework in order to explore how these two factors were related to the agenda-setting process in the post-2010 reauthorization discourse. The research data was collected through the conduct and coding of informant interviews and the review of a sampling of Congressional hearings.   I conducted 14 stakeholder interviews between September 2012 and November 2012: 8 participants were from inside the government (the Administration, Civil Servants, and Congress) and 6 participants were from outside the government (interest groups, media, academic/researchers/consultants, social movement). I cross-compared a sample of reauthorization-related committee hearings from 2001-2006 (the 107th-109th Congresses) with a sample of reauthorization hearings from 2007-2011 (the 110th - 112th Congresses).  To provide a larger context, I analyzed relevant scholarly articles and public opinion polls and included ethnographic information gathered from interview field-notes. The three research objectives included: (1) to determine if the social construction of TANF recipients was related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the governmental agenda; (2) to determine if the state of the economy was related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the governmental agenda; and (3) to determine what factors (in addition to, or instead of) were related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the political agenda. Results from this study indicate that the TANF reauthorization effort in this time period was far removed from an open policy window. There was no identified problem: extensions continued to maintain funding, cases were not increasing, and the public was not demanding action. Additionally, past entrepreneurs became fragmented or concerned with different topics, the implementation of the policy became standardized and incorporated into administrative practice, and the policymakers were wary about expending their political capital on a still divisive topic. Regarding research objective one, results show that the negative social construction of the welfare program, if not the welfare recipients themselves, remained a barrier to reauthorization. While the participants in the interviews expressed a sympathetic tone when describing TANF recipients, they asserted that those accepting cash-based assistance continued to be negatively constructed by both the public and politicians. For research objective two, results show that another barrier to reauthorization in this period was the depressed economy. Despite the state of the economy and increased unemployment there was not considerable support for increasing TANF spending in the recession, in part due to the negative social construction still attributed to this target population and competition among social programs. Finally, while the research was designed to specifically pull out themes associated with the social construction of TANF recipients and the state of the economy, an exploratory research objective was utilized to examine what other factors contribute to why the TANF program had not been reauthorized. As a result of this analysis, 4 themes that influenced the likelihood of change were identified: 1) the existing TANF policy was popular; 2) the welfare community (of states, administrators, and advocates) feared that any changes made might be punitive; 3) there were no identified active entrepreneurs; and 4) the topic of welfare was too politically divisive. The study intended to further inform the field of welfare agenda-setting practices by exploring the effects of multiple factors, including an economic recession, on the agenda-setting stage of welfare. Additionally, the study added to the theoretical understanding of the social construction of public assistance policy.