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Theories of the Welfare Contract
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20720 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
4,464 Words |
| Author
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Michael D. Weiss
Michael D. Weiss is an adjunct professor of law at the
University of Houston. He is also a fellow at the Texas Public
Policy Foundation, where he works in American legal reform. |
In their recent book, America's Misunderstood Welfare State, Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and Philip Harvey (respectively, a political scientist and a professor of law, both a Yale, and a practicing lawyer in New York) identify four distinct ideologies of welfare.
1.The egalitarian populists call for the redistribution of income and power to the less privileged. 2.The behavioralists want public programs to induce beneficiaries to act in more socially responsible ways. 3.The residualist vision demands the "rescue" through social constructs of those persons who, through no fault of their own, cannot possibly support themselves. 4.The social-insurance school envisions public programs in which individuals and families "buy" protection against temporary financial straits or hardship due to unforeseen economic adversity through universal contribution and universal benefit.
The egalitarian theory-often allied with socialism--holds that an unconditional right to sustenance exists for all humans and that this "right" should be secured by the state through an obligatory welfare system. This theory is embodied and expounded by such authors as John Rawls, frank I. Michelman, and Michael Harrington and is reflected in those current views that hold that welfare is and should be an unrestricted entitlement. This view is strongly suspicious of--and often downright hostile toward--any effort to curtail, restrict, or otherwise limit welfare benefits or welfare eligibility by "the poor." It usually opposes any attempt to use welfare as means of altering the behavior of recipients and opposes governmental social control or paternalism.
The New Paternalism
Turning to the other three approaches, the first, behaviorlism, is most clearly identified with what is commonly called "the new paternalism." The theory is most prominently expounded by Lawrence Mead, professor of politics at New York University and author of Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship and, more recently, The New Politics of Poverty. Behavioralists like Mead have used entitlements to justify novel efforts at social control through welfare, namely, "workfare."
According to Mead, poverty today is caused by "a culture of defeatism," which breeds feelings of hopelessness, fatalism, and exclusion from the rest of society. To him, "the difficulty is not the benefits but the lack of corresponding obligations. We [need to] affect people's behavior by requiring
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