Success Stories: Welfare Reform, Policy Discourse, and the Politics of Research

Welfare reform is now widely hailed as a success. In this article, the authors analyze this public verdict as a political construction. During the 1980s and 1990s, welfare discourse shifted to emphasize concerns over program dependency. This shift not only promoted policy retrenchment, it also defined the terms on which retrenchment would be judged. Specifically, it established caseload levels and studies of program “leavers” as a common frame of reference for judging welfare reform. This article presents evidence that a majority of media stories on welfare reform from 1998 to 2000 offered positive assessments. The authors then show that perceptions of reform as a policy success depend chiefly on the diversion of attention away from standards of evaluation and interpretations of evidence that might suggest failure. They conclude by discussing how the construction of policy success is likely to affect upcoming debates over the renewal of welfare reform.