2 Mead
but incomplete. The welfare issue goes back to the early 1960s, and the earlier episodes conditioned
the later debate. Existing accounts also lack substantive content. They relate outcomes to political
events, but they do not explain well what the welfare dispute was about.
Research on other aspects of welfare politics shows similar limitations. We have studies of
public opinion as it applies to welfare.
We have accounts of individual episodes of reform including
the Nixon and Carter proposals to liberalize welfare in the 1960s and 1970s as well as PRWORA.
But we lack studies that trace the debate over time and that highlight its issue content. Only three
recent books cover the whole controversy since the 1960s, and they give the earlier period too little
attention.
In this study we code Congressional hearings and debates so as to portray the stakes in the
welfare battle and how it changed over more than thirty years. I searched for comparable research
by querying academic authorities on Congress. I also searched JSTOR and Robert U. Goehlert and
John R. Sayre, The United States Congress: A Bibliography (New York: Free Press, 1982). I found
remarkably little. There appears to be no published research on welfare politics remotely like this.
2004).
3
Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
4
Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family
Assistance Plan (New York: Random House, 1973); Vincent J. Burke and Vee Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed:
Welfare Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., and David deft.
Whitman, The President as Policymaker: Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1981). For PRWORA, see note 2.
5
Steven M. Teles, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (Lawrence, KS: University Press of
Kansas, 1996); Gary Bryner, Politics and Public Morality: The Great American Welfare Reform Debate
(New York: Norton, 1998); Weaver, Ending Welfare as We Know It.
6
The nearest parallel is my study is Michael Reinhard, “The Force of Ideas, Problem Definition,
Disjoint Policy Change and the Politics of Welfare” (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Political
Science, September 3, 2003). Reinhard codes witnesses in welfare hearings in 1988 and 1993-4 in terms of
words they use that he associates with several dimensions of welfare discourse. However, the words are
counted by computer, the work obligation dimension is missing, and Reinhard does not assess the intellectual
structure of arguments as I do. The study covers only part of the hearings for FSA and PRWORA.
Convention