Research Errors
Most academic research about welfare or poverty also lacked influence because policymakers
did not believe it. Many thought scholars had misread the nature of the welfare problem or the
feasibility of enforcing work. Research made all the steps in statecraft shown in Figure 1 seem more
difficult or questionable than they turned out to be.
Public opinion
Many political scientists misrepresented the public opinion of welfare. One argument was
that the public actually supported pre-reform welfare programs such as AFDC and Food Stamps,
with the implication that they should not be fundamentally changed.22 Much more prominent have
been analyses saying that the public opposes welfare, but that this reflects hostility to the poor. On
this view, ordinary Americans mostly blame the poor for their own problems, so government should
do little to help them.
23 Or the voters are willing to be led toward cuts by politicians who “frame”
tissues so as to stress the “undeservingness” of the poor.
24 In an influential argument, Martin Gilens
characterizes much of the public hostility to welfare as racist; the voters oppose aid because it is
associated with blacks, who are often seen as lazy.25 The implication is that policymakers should
protect welfare against reform demands because the motivations behind them are unacceptable.
However, in light of these interpretations, it is hard to explain why American even has a
welfare state, or civil rights laws. A more plausible view is that the public is angry with welfare
more than with the poor. Ordinary Americans want government to help the needy, but they criticize
the traditional form of cash aid as permissive. They want to help families and children in trouble but
at the same time they demand that adult recipients to work alongside the taxpayers.
26 In the 1980s
and 1990s, this interpretation was advanced more forcefully, not by academics, but by the non-
11
university Public Agenda Foundation.27 Work tests combined with continued aid was exactly the
strategy that reform finally followed, to largely good effects.