Mead 37
positions, and that the determinants of the agenda include attitudes associated with both left and
right. Schattschneider was correct: The framing of the issue in politics is a different and more
important question than the position one takes on that issue. The growing paternalism of the
discourse does not simply mean growing conservatism under another name. Rather, the agenda
shifts even though most of the participants remain left of center, particularly on progressive issues.
The results to date question the dominant view of welfare politics as a partisan battle over the
scale of government. While progressive dispute strongly shaped the early stages of reform, and
returned to prominence in PRWORA, it is far from the whole story. National politics moved to the
right, but more important, policy experience and research encouraged a more practical and less
ideological stance toward poverty. The political class refocused its attention on how to move more
adult recipients into jobs, and also on how to improve child support payments. These were the chief
goals of the paternalist discourse that dominates FSA. They lived on, these results suggest, even
through the more partisan fires of PRWORA.
The shallow historical depth of the existing accounts of PRWORA misses the way the earlier
stages laid the groundwork for the radical 1990s. Despite PRWORA’s loud progressive rhetoric,
what the act principally did was toughen work and child support requirements. That behavioral
focus reflects the dependency style of welfare politics, not progressive divisions. The change
emerged from the earlier welfare battles going back to the 1960s, and even the Republican partisans
of the mid 1990s had to accept this. Even under a Republican Congress, it was far easier to move
welfare to the “right” in paternalist than in progressive terms.
The floor debates in Congress still remain to be coded. I expect that members of Congress
will exhibit the same shifts in opinion and in the agenda seen in the hearings. The small number of
members who testified in the hearings already shows this (see Table 4). On average, members
41
This view is also supported by Reinhard, “Force of Ideas,” which is based on a comparison of FSA
and PRWORA more limited than my own. See further discussion of this study above.
Convention