The Welfare Experiments

Politics and Policy Evaluation

Robin H. Rogers-Dillon

• Publisher: Stanford Law and Politics
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780804767033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Welfare experiments conducted at the state level during the 1990s radically restructured the American welfare state and have played a critical—and unexpected—role in the broader policymaking process. Through these experiments, previously unpopular reform ideas, such as welfare time limits, gained wide and enthusiastic support. Ultimately, the institutional legacy of the old welfare system was broken, new ideas took hold, and the welfare experiments generated a new institutional channel in policymaking.In this book, Rogers-Dillon argues that these welfare experiments were not simply scientific experiments, as their supporters frequently contend, but a powerful political tool that created a framework within which few could argue successfully against the welfare policy changes. Legislation proposed in 2002 formalized this channel of policymaking, permitting the executive, as opposed to legislative, branches of federal and state governments to renegotiate social policies—an unprecedented change in American policymaking. This book provides unique insight into how social policy is made in the United States, and how that process is changing.

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Pilot Programs

I think it is fair to say the debate is over. . . . We now know that
welfare reform works.

President Bill Clinton, 1997

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) presents a riddle. For decades, substantial welfare reform had stalled at the federal level. The reform efforts that did pass, notably the Family Support Act of 1988, were watered down as they worked their way through the massive welfare bureaucracy. Efforts at reform had, at best, a slight impact on the majority of welfare recipients. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) seemed to be a large bureaucracy that would withstand the most virulent political attacks by virtue of its sheer size and age. Then something odd happened. The system crumbled in the span of a few years. The demise of welfare was a matter of fact. Time-limited welfare, a radical departure from AFDC, was taken for granted as an obvious solution to a failed policy just a few years after even minor alterations to AFDC seemed to be a political impossibility. How did this happen?

To address this question, we need to look beyond the traditional actors in policymaking—the interest groups, members of Congress, and presidential administrations. All of these actors were important in welfare reform, but they do not fully explain the dramatic restructuring of the American welfare state that took place in 1996. President Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it” in his 1992 presidential campaign laid the groundwork for radical reform of the welfare system. The slogan “two years and you’re off” famously, and unintentionally, paved the way for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).¹ The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 increased the momentum for welfare reform. In fact, welfare reform was one of the stated objectives in the Republican Contract with America, the platform on which many Republican members ran for office and won.

Yet even this constellation of factors fails to explain why such profound changes in the American welfare state passed with so little fanfare and why what had been an unthinkable policy idea became the obvious solution to reforming welfare in such a short period. To answer that question, we need to understand the political role of the experimental welfare pilot programs and how they became a part of the policy-making process.

The case of welfare reform in 1996 raises a set of larger questions: How is public policy made? How do we decide whether a new policy idea will work? Who determines which path to take when there are competing ideas? Historical institutional research has placed considerable emphasis on the role of overtly political actors—legislators and interest groups—in garnering support for favored policy ideas. In this book, I argue that there is a critical and largely unrecognized institutional channel in social policymaking—experimental pilot programs. Pilot programs are designed to test new policy ideas. They permit policy innovations to leave the realm of political debate and to come to life in programs that affect real people, programs that can be observed and whose results can be measured. They demonstrate to the public and policy elites whether or not a policy will work. Defining what works is a powerful political tool. It is particularly powerful if the definition of what works is framed as a scientific assessment objectively determined outside of the political realm.

Yet pilot programs, as this book demonstrates, are not neutral, and they are not outside of the political process. The very existence of a pilot program is often a part of a larger political strategy. Pilot programs can be used to send an idea “to committee” in order to placate advocates of a proposed policy even if the broader initiative is dead in the political waters. Similarly, pilot programs can postpone a political conflict, on the basis that “more research is needed,” until a time when policy actors find more advantages.² Political actors can use pilot programs to claim credit on a policy issue that is not moving through normal legislative channels and thus avoid the consequences of failing to act on a popular policy issue. In the early 1990s, experimental welfare pilot programs were used by both Democrats and Republicans to claim progress as the federal legislative process stalled.³ Evelyn Z. Brodkin and Alexander Kaufman have argued that pilot programs “have a tactical utility in the competition for space on the policy agenda.”⁴ As Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson so brilliantly demonstrated with his highly visible welfare reform pilot programs, pilot programs can also define a policy idea and set the terms of a political debate.

Policy choices are about values and technical efficacy. Political rhetoric often emphasizes values. What do we want this country to do? What is the proper role of the government? What are America’s fiscal and political priorities? The political realm is home to issues of values and priorities. Technical policy questions on the surface appear to be more concrete. Will a policy do what we want it to do? Will it work? Thus, policy questions are often understood to go through a process from the abstract, value-driven decision that the goal of a policy is desirable, to the specific, technical question of what means will attain that goal.⁵ Policy specialists ostensibly have the task of making sure that legislation is technically sound and will promote the values and priorities promised in the original debate. Administrators, in the final stage of bringing a policy to life, are charged with effectively implementing the policy and sorting out the ground-level technical details.

In American culture, however, efficiency and effectiveness are often raised to the level of values themselves. Given this reality, is it then possible to separate the technical from the political? In the quote that began this chapter, Clinton hailed welfare reform by stating “the debate is over. . . . We now know that welfare reform works.” Clinton did not claim that good had triumphed over evil, but rather that a system that works had replaced a broken one. American politicians often invoke the practicality of their ideas to gain popular support. In effect, they say: “My ideas work, my opponents’ do not.”

Technical questions, however, are not completely separate from political questions. Claiming that a policy idea works is politically powerful in itself. This is particularly true if the claim is based on evidence purported to be “scientific.” As I will argue, such evidence often has little connection to social science. Nonetheless, Americans hold great faith in clinical tests. We believe that nearly all ideas can be scientifically tested and their value empirically proven. Americans are deeply suspicious of politics and scientific approaches appear, occasionally, to provide a viable alternative.

Deborah A. Stone has argued that America is engaged in a “rationality project.” “The fields of political science, public administration, law, and policy analysis,” Stone writes, “have shared a common mission of rescuing public policy from the irrationalities and indignities of politics, hoping to conduct it instead with rational, analytical, and scientific methods.”⁶ Even the language that we use to describe the study of politics and society reveals a faith that they can be rendered orderly. Our universities teach political science and policy analysis. Our studies of politics and society are housed in divisions of social science. The quest for rationality is particularly strong in the face of the disorder that normally characterizes politics. Americans diligently have sought to expand the former in order to minimize the latter. As Stone notes, “Inspired by a vague sense that reason is clean and politics is dirty Americans yearn to replace politics with rational decisionmaking.”⁷

A faith in rationality is as central to American identity as is our distrust of politics. There is nothing inherently wrong with the American quest for rationality. Our constitutional structure, in one supremely noteworthy example of the triumph of rationality, has produced a stable, prosperous democracy that is to be marveled at more than criticized. And I am partial to a legal system based on, at least in principle, reason rather than authority. But there is a point at which the rationality project fails. Rather than encouraging knowledge and understanding, it obscures truths that do not fit within its rubric. The rationality project becomes procrustean.

In this book, I argue that this faith in the power of rationality to cleanse politics has caused us to overlook the political role of policy experiments. Testing policy ideas has not taken policy out of the political realm and placed it into the scientific realm; rather, it has created an institutional role for experimental programs in the policy-making process. Looking at the political role of policy experiments does not diminish the value of social science research or rationality. Instead, it takes away the blinders that social scientists put on in an attempt not to be distracted from empirical policy evaluation by passing political fashions. The desire to remove policy evaluation from politics is a noble one. The idea that “everybody’s entitled to their own statistic” makes people who believe that the world does exist in some measurable way wince. We can do better than that. There is, however, an expanse of territory between the idea that research is nothing more than politics dressed up in fancy statistics and the idea that social research, particularly policy research, can ever fully be extracted from its political context.

In this book, I argue that researchers, particularly those involved in policy evaluation, have erred too far in the latter direction. The claim that research can be extracted from politics emanates from two related facts. First, trained and committed evaluation researchers believe that research can provide important and real results that are relevant to social policy. I believe that, too. Second, as policy evaluation became professionalized in the late 1960s and 1970s, it had to establish its own domain—what do evaluators do that is different from what other social scientists do? Why should the government listen to evaluators and, in fact, fund them? Here, I believe, evaluators began to stretch their ability to separate policy research and politics beyond the breaking point. In itself, this is not an unusual or particularly dangerous phenomenon. Professional groups often exaggerate the distinctiveness of their practices in order to make clear that only those within their fold are capable of providing particular services. In this case, however, the claims of evaluators had a ripple effect beyond the professional realm. The public accepted the fictitious divide between politics and policy evaluation.

The divide between politics and policy evaluation is inherently attractive. It fits with America’s pragmatic bent toward politics—our taste for “what works” over ideological solutions. The best that social science can truly do, however, is to make clear what is involved in a particular program: the outcomes, how the programs actually functioned on the ground (not only as written), and the normative and value conflicts inherent within the program both on paper and in practice. Social science cannot tell us “what works” because “what works” is not solely an empirical question. It is a political one. In the 1990s, the professional claims making of evaluators obscured the political aspects of social experiments. Not surprisingly, politicians then put the fiction of apolitical policy experiments to their own political uses.

Pilot Programs and Welfare Reform

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act would very likely not have passed without the pilot programs, which were also known as “waiver” programs because they required the federal government to waive AFDC requirements. Although it is impossible to rule out completely that some other political and institutional structure could have produced welfare reform, the evidence that the pilot programs played crucial roles in shaping the policy details of PRWORA is compelling. It therefore merits looking beyond the conventional wisdom that policy experiments play a minor political role. In PRWORA, the empirical results from the numerous welfare reform experiments that preceded it were politically unimportant. However, the existence of the pilot programs reshaped the political landscape and made reform possible.

The pilot programs from 1992 to 1996 redefined what welfare means in the United States. They did not simply tinker with welfare-to-work programs or make small changes in the incentive structure within welfare. These programs redefined welfare as a temporary program rather than an entitlement. They abolished the entitlement to welfare in the public mind well before Congress ended it. More importantly, the pilot programs engaged the public through widespread media coverage. The previous pilot programs were in the domain of experts. The welfare experiments of the early to middle 1990s were in the public eye. Covered on the nightly news and in numerous newspaper articles, the welfare experiments changed the politics of welfare reform more visibly and dramatically than ever before.

Pilot programs are “shadow institutions” in the political process.⁸ They are a way of taking policy ideas and publicly determining whether the ideas are viable. They are also fundamentally tied to the political process both in their administration, which is often filled by political appointees, and in their public role as an institutional channel through which the viability of a public policy is determined. Yet, they do even more than provide an institutional arena for policy ideas that buffers them from the political climate. Pilot programs show us whether the policy will “work” or not. They provide a glimpse of a newborn idea and shape our expectations of what the mature policy will look like well before the evaluation results are out. Arguably, pilot programs are most powerful before the evaluation research is complete, when they have been removed from politics but are not yet mired in empirical results.

Pilot programs can also serve the structural function of weakening policy legacies from below, as they did in the welfare reform experiments of the early 1990s. The structure of an existing program is often altered to permit a temporary experiment. By putting new administrative structures and procedures in place, even temporarily, the inertia of the old system is broken, creating an opportunity for permanent reform. Pilot programs, therefore, do not just test policy ideas; they play a political and structural role in the policy-making process. Pilot programs define the reality of the abstract ideas being debated. They change the bureaucratic structures of the institutions being targeted for reform. In the mid-1990s, pilot programs made time-limited welfare a reality and took away the argument that it could not be done.

This book is about the macro- and micropolitics that made time-limited welfare possible. By analyzing the political role of the pilot programs in an institutional framework, I hope to contribute to a stronger theoretical conceptualization of how and why welfare reform passed in 1996. More broadly, I aim to bring the experimental pilot programs—shadow institutions—out of the shadows and into mainstream political institutionalist theories of American policy development in sociology and political science. The role of the pilot programs in the welfare debate is a central feature of the book. Yet there is strong evidence that the pilot programs did more than shape the debate. These programs structurally changed the institutions that provide public assistance, the welfare offices themselves, which were notorious barriers to reform.⁹

The pilot programs eroded the institutional structures of AFDC and made it possible for a new welfare program to take a radically different direction without being dragged down by existing institutional structures and memory. To understand the street-level impact of pilot programs and welfare politics, it is important to look inside the “black box” of implementation. The public faith that policy experiments are removed from politics is what gives experimental programs their political power. Looking inside the “black box,” it becomes clear that these programs are not removed from politics and, furthermore, that they cannot be removed from politics. Here I wish to make an important distinction. I do believe that policy experiments can and shou...