Cultural categories and the American welfare state: The case of guaranteed income policy

There is considerable evidence that cultural categories of worth are central to the ideological foundation of the American welfare state. However, existing perspectives on U. S. welfare policy development grant little explanatory power to the role of culture. For this reason, they cannot adequately explain the dynamics of an important, but frequently overlooked, episode in American welfare state history: the rise and fall of guaranteed annual income proposals in the 1960s and 1970s. The author outlines three mechanisms - schematic, discursive, and institutional - through which culture can influence policy outcomes. He then argues that cultural categories of worthiness affected welfare policy development through their constitutive contribution to cultural schemas, their deployment by actors as resources in expert deliberation and public discourse, and their institutionalization in social programs that reinforced the symbolic and programmatic boundaries between categories of the poor. The author discusses how these cultural mechanisms can be integrated with existing class- and institution-based accounts of welfare policy development.