Benjamin O’Connor

17.203j / 11.002

October 20, 1999

Poverty on the public agenda:

Who and Why?

It often seems that during election years, new issues are brought onto the public agenda. Not that poverty is a new issue; it’s probably been a concern for as long as this country has been in existence, if not longer. However, combating poverty has certainly not been an issue on the minds of many voters or congressional committees for some time now. This leads us to wonder what has made this issue so important all of a sudden. If we look closely at the issue, how it’s framed, and the sources of some of the newly proposed solutions to it, we can roughly discern what groups are really responsible for putting poverty on the public agenda. The truth is that this is certainly not a widespread social movement caused by great uprisings of the working poor. One needs to look no further than the converging streams of society that have allowed this issue to become addressed in order to begin to understand the policy-making models behind this phenomenon.

The political and economic climates of this country have become extremely favorable for such policy issues as compassion towards the working poor. The booming economy has greatly increased personal wealth among the middle and upper classes of this country. This makes the division between rich and poor even more striking. This is summarized in the October 6^th Boston Globe article entitled “Problems of the poor return to campaigns:”

As payrolls and family incomes swell for wealthy and middle-income Americans, the roaring economy has left a seemingly irreducible class among the poorest Americans, and a growing group of people who are working and yet lack such essentials as health insurance.

A budget surplus and a booming economy mean that there is plenty of money available to throw at this problem. Furthermore, the public’s attitude towards liberalism and compassionate public policies also play a role in the favorable climate for dealing with this issue. After nearly eight years of conservative republican leadership in congress, an attitude of moderate compassion seems to be prevailing in the minds of most Americans. Presidential candidate George W. Bush is calling himself a “compassionate conservative” and seems to be trying to distance himself ideologically from the conservative right as much as possible. All of these factors make up the convergent streams that are just now, in an election year, converging and bringing the issue of poverty and the working poor to the forefront.

From reading the abovementioned Boston Globe article, examining the issue, and applying a little bit of common sense, perhaps one can determine what groups of people are really responsible for putting poverty on the public agenda. A close look at the situation shows that it’s certainly not a widespread social movement caused by activism and uprisings on the part of the working poor. On the contrary, history and studies show that poverty and unemployment are only weakly related to activism: “Being unemployed … apparently has less effect on an individual’s political values and behavior than does his or her attitude toward unemployment.” (Reich, et. al. 25) The fact of the matter is that 2000 is an election year, and the presidential candidates find this issue particularly appealing because it evokes a need for compassion, from conservatives and liberals alike.

There are a few models of public policy formation that would actually do fairly well to explain this phenomenon. This is an example of a policy issue that has apparently been brought to the forefront by entities other than the general electorate. The fact that the people we hear talking about these issues are presidential candidates, their aides, and their supporters leads us towards a somewhat elitist model of the situation. However, the concept of helping the poor is really pluralist at its heart. The public does have a genuine concern for helping the poor; particularly the working poor. On the other hand, the public also has a genuine interest in a lot of other things, such as the environment, tax policy, violence in schools, educational quality and gun control. The “elite” in this case are those looking towards becoming the next president. They have brought this issue to the forefront because it’s one that they can generate policy for and earn bipartisan support.

The pluralism that has spawned this issue in the first place is more Laissez faire than corporate. The concern to help the poor is a genuine interest to people, regardless of their own economic condition. A more economically stable working class benefits everyone and helps make the economy even stronger in the long run. In the case of this phenomenon, it is genuine pluralist public generation of policy concerns combined with an elitist amplification of one of those concerns in particular that has brought this issue to the forefront in this election year.