The State’s Relations: What the Institution of Family Tells Us about Governance:

Abstract The authors examine family as an institution of governance in American welfare provision in nineteenth-century poor laws and the twenty-first-century earned income tax credit. Their study demonstrates family's important role achieving public policy aims, illustrates the extent to which governments have relied on nongovernmental actors, describes the tools they use, and shows how citizens' relationship to the state is translated back through nongovernmental institutions. Called upon in the task of governing, family-the hallmark of the private sphere-illustrates the mechanisms that governments use and the extent of governing authority necessary to get actors to comply with policy aims. Keywords governance, welfare policy, institutions, family The job of governments is to govern-to do the work associated with carrying out public policy. To combat criminal behavior, state, local, and federal governments erect an agency to house police, and those police are the agents that directly enforce criminal law. But they do not do this work alone (Peters and Pierre 1998; Rhodes 1996). State governments directly contract out prison services to for-profit providers, and governments indirectly tap other professionals to aid in their job of enforcing criminal law. For example, doctors are required by law to report drug abuse, while teachers are required to report child abuse. Though the enlistment of direct contracting is familiar and extending it to other actors who work in civic positions is not too far a stretch, we may not expect to see the same types of actions closer to home in the very fabric of our personal lives. Yet, parents are not immune from the same instrumentalism when they are counted on to police families in the logic of governing through crime (Simon 2007) or as "chief law enforcers" in graduated driver licensing laws, which extend the probationary period for teen drivers and restrict the hours and number of passengers in the car (Hirshey 2007). Nongovernmental actors are routinely enlisted to play roles as bureaucratic agents, the key administrators in scores of policies. Medicare directly contracts most of its paperwork processing to third-party providers. More indirectly, hospitals not only provide care for low-income or indigent clients but are an important means by which low-income Americans become enrolled in Medicaid and state children's health insurance programs (Patterson and Cox 2001). Public and nonprofit schools run the federally subsidized National School Lunch Program in which schools are reimbursed for providing free or reduced cost meals that meet federal guidelines to eligible children. In addition, parents are fundamental in the success of school voucher programs. William Howell (2004, 225) explains, "Families must locate an appropriate private school for their child, apply for admission, find transportation between school and home, and supplement the vouchers with private funds." At bottom, governments "govern" with the help of a host of institutions: directly by contracting with third-party providers for specific services (for-profit prisons, Medicare paperwork); indirectly by marshalling the institutional resources of actors whose aims are other than the particular governmental objective (doctors and teachers enforcing criminal law and schools and hospitals administering public programs); and "privately" through relationships that are-and seem-beyond the purview of public policy making. These examples lay bare the difference between theories of how governing works and the actual practice it entails. Although it is apparent that governing relies on a score of nongovernmental agents, scholars neglect the entire range of institutions that policy makers may enlist to carry out policy goals. Hence, scholarship to date remains thin on the extent to which governments rely on nongovernmental actors, the institutional capacities necessary to do so, and the effects this has on an institution and the individuals of which it is comprised. …