Has Public Opinion on Poverty and Welfare Shifted in Some Fundamental (and Progressive) Way?

One of the arguments made in favor of the 1996 law that replaced AFDC with the Temporary Assistance program was that it would result in more public support for policies that help people experiencing poverty. In a fascinating research paper published in the February 2007 edition of the American Political Science Review, Joe Soss and Sanford Schram conclude that it has not:

Thus, in the postreform era, the tendency to attribute poverty to lack of effort has held steady, feelings toward the poor have grown slightly cooler, efforts to aid the poor have remained associated with "welfare," and willingness to aid the poor has stayed the same or diminished.

Soss and Schram also examine whether the post-1996 law decline in welfare's salience as an issue has helped Democrats politically.

In sum, we find that reform made welfare less salient as a basis for party evalution, but decreased salience does not seem to have yielded broader political gains for the Democratic party. Welfare opponents remained just as numerous after 1996 as in the AFDC era, and these individuals became no more likely to identify with the Democratic Party or vote for Democratic candidates.

Soss and Schram conclude:

Our findings clearly cast doubt on recent claims that welfare reform has softened public opposition to anti-poverty efforts. Prior to welfare reform, most Americans supported more generous spending on aid to the poor. Yet actual proposals to help the poor were easily tainted by negative racialized images of welfare handouts. Our analysis suggests that this basic opinion configuration—this underlying set of political resources—remains in place.

PS: Also worth checking out by Soss and Schram, along with Richard Fording, is their new paper in Social Science Review on the role of local political values on Temporary Assistance sanctioning. Part of what makes this and other papers by Soss and Schram so interesting is that they move beyond the dominant focus in social science literature on individual characteristics.