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Income Testing and Social Cohesion
| Article
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10063 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
8,921 Words |
| Author
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James Coleman
James Coleman is professor of sociology at the University of
Chicago. He is the author of Power and the Structure of
Society and Resources for Social Change. |
As governments in liberal democracies have assumed an increasingly broad range of responsibilities for the welfare of their citizens, major questions have arisen about how these responsibilities should be met. One important question is whether a program should be universally available or available only to those persons or households with income below a certain level.
One issue that arises in resolving this question is the possibility that income-tested programs will bifurcate the society by creating two classes above and below the income-transfer line. Will a welfare program, available to the poor alone, pit the taxed against the recipients, benefactors against beneficiaries? If so, this could replace the multiple lines of cross cutting political cleavage by a singe line that fractionates society. In this case government would be an instrument of one side--or a mediator between the two. If this scenario were realized, the cohesion of society would be sharply reduced, and the potential for exacerbated political conflict would rise.
In certain cases, like education, redistribution has characteristically taken the form of benefits provided to all, while in income support programs benefits are means tested. But if the range of government responsibilities were to increase, as is the trend throughout the world, the question arises whether society might not function with less internal conflict if most benefits were not means tested, but provided to all.
The answer is not at all clear. There are arguments and evidence on both sides. In order to better assess the nature of these arguments and the weight of evidence on both sides, I will first present the case on the opposite side. The discussion will not address the general question of the overall merits of the two approaches, but rather the considerably narrower question of their impact on social cohesion.
What is social cohesion?
Before presenting the arguments, however, I want to be more precise about what I mean to include under the rubric "social cohesion." Cohesion implies strong positive bonds. The lack of social cohesion, whether brought about by government policies or by other factors, may arise in either of two ways: the presence of conflict, hostility, and other antagonisms, or the absence of any kind of relationship.
Second, cohesion may imply strong positive bonds between
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