Welfare State: Goods, Services & Social Objectives

• Contemporary societies face difficult choices between competing values even with scientific knowledge.
• It is clear democracies need to made aware of the implications of their choices regarding social policy.

Social Welfare Policy

• Social welfare policy courses traditionally examine process and performance.
• Process courses cover social, political, and technical policy formulation.
• Performance courses cover operational details of social welfare programs.
• A major advantage of studying performance is the focus on facts: substantive evaluation is key.
• However, the major shortcoming is how they continually change.
• Title XX Amendment to the Social Security Act alone covers 20+ service categories.
• A third approach focuses on the fundamental social policy choices in planning the welfare state.
• The focus is to dissect policy components rather than examine sociopolitical processes.

Title XX Social Service Categories

• States offer more than 20 different categories of service under Title XX.
• Categories include:
  • Adoption Services
  • Case Management
  • Congregate Meals
  • Counseling Services
  • Day Care (Adults)
  • Day Care (Children)
  • Education and Training Services
  • Employment Services
  • Family Planning Services
  • Foster Care Services (Adults)
  • Foster Care Services (Children)
  • Health-Related Services
  • Home-Based Services
  • Home-Delivered Meals
  • Housing Services
  • Independent/Transitional Living Services
  • Information and Referral
  • Legal Services
  • Pregnancy and Parenting
  • Prevention/Intervention (At-Risk Families)
  • Protective Services (Adult)
  • Protective Services (Child)
  • Recreational Services
  • Residential Treatment
  • Special Services (Disabled)
  • Special Services (Youth)
  • Substance Abuse Services
  • Transportation

Framework for Social Welfare Policy Analysis

• Basic policy components are best seen as dimensions of choice.
• An analytic approach uses program descriptions as examples to formulate general concepts.
• A key advantage is equipping students with concepts that explain policies usefully.
• Examples include: War on Poverty
• Model Cities Programs of the 1960s
• Older Americans Act,
• Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments of the 1970s
• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
• An analytic framework is an intellectual tool that orders reality by distilling complex phenomena.

Benefit Allocations

• Constructing an analytic framework to understand social welfare requires identifying common elements in social welfare policies.
• The commonalities vary based on the abstraction level of the analysis.
• An analytic framework is a conceptual lens for studying the phenomena.
• Use is made of an analytic framework placing welfare policy in the context of a benefit-allocation mechanism outside the economic marketplace
• Welfare ensures an individual's market value isn't the sole measure of their right to welfare.

The Social Market of the Welfare State

• Social welfare allocations occur outside the economic marketplace.
• The conceptual domain needs to be clarified by distinguishing between social and economic markets: principles and motives that guide the allocation of provisions.
• The social market of the welfare state allocates services based on :
  • financial need
  • dependency
  • altruistic sentiments
  • social obligations
  • charitable motives
  • wish for communal security.
• Benefits in a capitalist society are distributed through the economic market based on:
  • individual initiative
  • ability
  • productivity
  • desire for profit.

Public vs. Private Sector

• The social market has both a public and private sector.
• The public sector includes federal, state, and local governments.
• The public sector accounts for the largest portion of goods/ services.
• Private sector includes:
  • informal efforts of family and friends
  • services provided by voluntary agencies
  • occasionally, by profit-oriented agencies.
• The roles of public, voluntary, profit-oriented, and informal units are combined.
• The variety in benefit allocations is referred to as the mixed economy of welfare.
• Although profit-oriented agencies are a small segment, their numbers grew, and there were proposals for their expansion.
• There was a scheme for government and business partnerships aimed at integrating welfare and economic development.
• A significant part of the present welfare system might be replaced by government grants to businesses that agree to hire the chronically unemployed.
• Public funds for social services would be allocated to businesses, eliminating the need for government administration.
• Welfare provisions contribute to human capital formation by joining business institutions.
• This confers legitimacy and value to welfare activities as a productive force.

Criticisms

• Mixing welfare services and the market economy counters the communal ethos.
• Merger assumes harmony among social and economic purposes that is not self-evident.
• A capitalist society must deal with meeting needs vs rewarding merit.
• Functioning of economic and social markets in industrialized capitalist societies creates tension.
• The suggestion is these tensions maintain balance between charitable and profit-making impulses.

Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Perspective

• Human existence/ individual liberty can't be sustained long outside interdependent communities.
• Communities can't survive long unless members dedicate resources to shared projects.
• Exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes social environments and self-government.
• Individual rights can't be preserved without a communitarian perspective: includes human dignity/ social dimension.
• The preservation of individual liberty depends on institutions of civil society.
• This is where citizens learn respect for others/ self and acquire civic responsibilities/ appreciation for the rights of others.
• Communities and polities have obligations to be responsive to members/ foster participation.
• The perspective mandates attention to the social side of human nature/ responsibilities of citizens, etc.

Elements of an Analytic Framework

• Benefits remain social transfers allocated outside the economic marketplace, even with the increasing joinder of welfare with responsibilities..
• Welfare policies can be interpreted as choices.
• Principles determine what benefits are offered/ to whom/ how they are delivered/ how they are financed
• Not physical structures, but social constructs used in intellectual choices.
• Choices can be expressed in four questions:
• What are the bases of social allocations?
• What are the types of social provisions allocated?
• What are the strategies for the delivery of these provisions?
• What are the ways to finance these provision?
• Eveline Burns utilized a framework focused on 4 decisions: Nature/ amount of benefits
• Eligibility/ risk types Management of finance
• Administration Character/ structure

Dimensions of Choice

• We treat bases of social allocations and other points as "dimensions" of choice because each will be examined along three axes:
  • range of alternatives
  • social values that support them
  • the supporting theories/ assumptions.

Options

• The first two dimensions of choice are expressed in who gets what.
• Bases of social allocations address the "who" of social welfare policy.
• Policies enhance welfare through policy implementation: designating beneficiaries.
• Policies serve the interests of society and distribute benefits differentially.
• There are continuously tradeoffs among what is:
  • desirable,
  • what circumstances necessitate,
  • what the public will countenance.
• Numerous criteria used to determine eligibility for social provisions.
• These include status, size, age, education and/or income.
• However, concern rests on the principles that inform eligibility criteria design.
• Choices refer to the principles by which social provisions are made accessible.
• Guidelines are the operational definition of eligibility criteria.
• Policy choices involve cash provisions or "in-kind" services.
• Benefits are commonly distributed via vouchers, power, and consumer sovereignity than through cash.
• The third dimension addresses alternative strategies for delivering social provisions/ "how" to distribute.
• The ways delivery systems are designed are significant: policy guidelines are operationally expressed through the delivery mechanism.
• Benefit delivery strategies refer to alternative organizational arrangements/local community systems: the level at which consumer and providers meet.
• For example, consider job counseling services location/training standards

Delivery Systems

• When examining systems, strategies to enhance flow from service providers to consumers is key.
• However, in some scenarios there may increasing attention paid to the rationing of services..
• If policies function outside the marketplace, choices must be made concerning the sources/ financing types.
• It is important to recognize the distinction between funding benefits and delivering them. to understand these scenarios
• Clarify how funding ends and delivery begins is a common goal.
• Funding involves questions concerning where funds originate/ the manner in which they flow, but in forms like cash or other forms,
• Delivery can be organizational, or consumer-based.
• The major alternatives for financing concern money derived from sectors, levels of government involved, and taxes levied.
• In some situations, systems are interdependent: are in interconnected with conditionalities: requirements such as subsidies &insurance.
• The process through which these issues are resolved raises different choices concerning what is:
• decision-making arrangements
• roles political leadership:
• citizen participation
  • professional expertise.

Transformation of Social Services

• Focus is on social service provisions originally established under titles of the Social Security Act:
  • Titles I (Old Age Assistance ,
  • IV-A (Aid to Families With Dependent Children ,
  • X Aid to the Blind ,
  • XIV Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled ).]
• They are incorporated into Title XX of Security Act and refashioned into Social Services Block Grant(SSBG), there are are other sources.
• Social service emanates from multiple acts.
• Discussion of social service development must regard evolution in spending.
• The 1962 Social Security Act emphasized social services in public assistance-
• Between 1962-1972, federal growth significantly increased, but later congress addressed and capped the increase.
• Spending was lowered when these benefits were reconsidered as SSBG.

Eligibility

• The possibility of extending service eligibility was established for some people.
• Under security act amendments: anyone might become if deemed to be within 5 yrs.
• By 1972 people who didn't receive welfare benefits were well represented.
• 1967 amendments provided loophole through which states could push funds to become eligible for reimbursement.
• Title XX amendments heralded new set of cri that extended entitlement

Title XX Categories

• Government designated eligible, including (1) income maintenance (2) income eligibles (3) universal eligible
• Regulations targetted for those in these categories.
• This category allowed states with to designate groups with similar charateristics.
• When RONALD REAGAN was in charge: requirements were eliminated letting states do whatever.
• Social services were advances in 1962 in order to prevent people from being dependant.
• Welfare professional specified 'service' being 'casework by trained social worker.
• Social workers provide support to care for families, especially low income parents.
• Casework isn't a poverty cure. There was the illusion that everyone could improve their own situation.
• Derthick, "a distinction soon began to develop.
• After 1974, the state can create whichever goals necessary.
• 1313 distinct services for different districts. States also blend Title XX funds with lower level government services.
• Major Step was taken.

Financial Aid

• in 1967. This led to federal level placing income under administration.
• Increasing use of purchase-of-service arrangements increased the dispursal of responsibility.
• Flexible provisos over last three decades caused enormous expan of public funds.
• Under 1962 Law states were reim for federal share because states already had four different classes. The old the dead, childre.
• The definition got less clear over time though.
• There are limits on state/federal grants in order to unify the states around assistance standards.
• There becomes open-headed funding for both . With title programs ceeding.
• States could do what they wish. Those grants provide the funds. The rise and fall of states due to public funding grants.

Application

• the way to look at this program is through it elements such as what are the following
• bases of social alloc;selective to univesal
• nature of prov intangible/limited to concrete and diversify -
• delivery system combined
• financ open ended. In this case, it will show dimensions of change between each of these points. Next social justice, why? The basis can be analyzed in terms of equity and equality ,etc.

Dimensions of Choice

• The distribution of social resources is the most general case of policy.
• To what extent does the policy achieve social justice. - Social Justice: equality, equity and adequacy- examined here through financial aid; also examines equity.
• Public assistance and equity: stressed through the doctrine of "less eligibility," "That welfare must be lower than the income of the worse laborers"

Early Legislation

• Early legislators began to recognize that mothers deserved a chance.
• People began giving credits. Others didn't want people to become less skilled or seek work elsewhere.
• The political consensus shows many women joining welfare.
• Standards of Adequacy fluctuate. At different points in history people have tried to determine how much one must have to truly live. As time goes on, we see the increase of the value of necessity according to time.
• Many people think that certain levels are inadequate across different social/economic stratifications.

Competing Values

• From certain values the consideration of choice: privacy, dignity, work and independence may influence eligibility criteria.

Value Dichotomies

• The four value dichotomies suggest, but do exclude, possibilities.

• Value ranges are variations on central issues that differentiates conservatives from progressives with their emphasis on rights of the community vs individual.

• Cost effectiveness is most effective when it is measures as to the degree to each dollar is allocated to where it is need - applied to each dimension of choice..

• Social effectiveness is that a good allocation is made from a good decision, treating all as apart of a social body.

• The lack of these options cause one who could possibly be helped to avoid, and to be incapable.

• Effectiveness can be weighed with many things the quality of the community and the care given.

• Freedom of choice is important.

• The program is geared to provide rec with a number of diff factors of choice: social . Economic etc. All types.

• Each of those is weighed based on how it will give people a voice and power in their life.

• What is more democratic/beaureaicratic. The goal is to weight how each of will affect the end result and give people choice.

• In short TANF is a very difficult delivery sys becuase some don't have the resources to manage the program in addition to receiving it.

• All of these have their own unique way of assisting and have been proven to varying degrees to affect different points in socities programs.

• The subtle connection that can be observed allows for deep consideration between the preference. The aim and effects that a program should have on the client and society they aim to affect.

• Although difficult, we have tried to display the nuances of social influence: the value that a program is trying to promote and give for long periods.

• Each of the factors have made lasting marks

Assistance Types

• Types include Jobs available/able to change with incentives. But that's not alway s the case Job-The skill of worker the fact that you can not assume job and know how is good 1 2 facts that have.
• Tiner and welfare program had 1 to one help and it had 134 change for 1990 change. All of that was due to "tin" with poor.
• There have a numbers of poor that have been tinker with as well.
• The policy has been made through: 1 allocate . 2 the basic alter that been in order to help with social standing.

Explore guiding principles, allocation of goods/services in a welfare state, and overlap of private social welfare. Understand allocation foundations in capitalistic societies, social objectives, and challenges faced by programs like TANF.