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Abstract
Using papers from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, this paper argues that race
was a silent but powerful element in the Reagan administration’s first efforts at
reforming federal welfare policies. To provide empirical evidence of the importance of
race, I begin by setting forth a theory of a racially defined structure in national welfare
reform politics, consisting of partisan, policymaking subsystem, and issue definition
dimensions. I argue that the linking of race and welfare in the 1960s produced this
structure. The archival materials from the Reagan Presidential Library are then used to
investigate the impact of this structure upon the Reagan administration’s welfare
changes in the 1981Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA). Each dimension of the
racially defined structure of welfare politics are examined as they apply to the Reagan
case. The analysis finds that while much of this structure was relevant to understanding
the OBRA 1981 welfare reforms, the Reagan administration’s success in 1981 reflected
their subversion of the policymaking subsystem dimension. Moreover, because the
Reagan strategy was intended to be clean of any racial content, it was difficult to
definitively identify any racially motivated strategy in their policymaking. Nonetheless,
the absence of race in the Reagan strategy produced a demonstrable racial political
impact. The Reagan administration’s responses to criticism by African-Americans reveal
the racial content implicit in their racially neutral approach to welfare reform.
Introduction
Until the 1990s, there were few social scientists willing to argue that race was an integral
aspect of national welfare policy politics. In the early 1990s, two well-researched books by
prominent journalists argued that while race may no longer be overtly present in national
politics, major national political controversies over policies such as welfare or crime were
fraught with racial content. These claims embodied an inherent notion that the motivation for
these politics was based in a desire to cater to the racial resentments of southerners and northern
white ethnics (Edsall and Edsall 1991; Dionne 1991). While the racial code word hypothesis
was compelling, those who made such allegations were unable to offer direct empirical proof,
and instead could only offer this hypothesis as a highly plausible explanation for what they
observed. The original motivation for the research presented here was to unpack the notion of a
racial codeword – welfare – and determine the nature of that policy’s political relationship with
Convention