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Please join the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Workshop as they host Carolyn Barnes, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. 

Shifting Power to Make Government Programs More Effective

Jamila Michener and Carolyn Barnes  

Creating, sustaining, and administering social policies in ways that make people’s lives better is a central purpose of government. Though efficiency has often taken center stage in public discourse around social programs, scholars have not adequately attended to effectiveness. We define effective policy as that which: (1) meets the material needs of the people it is meant to help (2) enhances the democratic capacities of those who benefit from it (3) accomplishes these goals while imposing minimal burdens. Using this definition as a springboard, we examine an important but often overlooked mechanism for effectively administering social policy: power. Per the existing status quo, those with the most at stake are rarely the critical drivers of decision-making within government programs. People who rely on programs like Medicaid, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and WIC (Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infant, and Children), are resource poor, widely stigmatized, and presumed ill equipped to be active participants in governance. Drawing on in-depth research interviews with more than 250 users of such programs, we cull the insights of program participants to make the case that incorporating their voices into governance processes can contribute to the effectiveness of social programs. Our qualitative evidence highlights the loss of information and missed opportunities produced by a top-down approach to governance. Most broadly, we argue that cultivating effective social programs requires systematic shifts in the balance of power between the users of such programs, the bureaucrats who administer them, and the policymakers who design them.

BIO

Carolyn Barnes is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her research agenda broadly explores the social and political implications of social policy on low-income populations in the areas of childcare policy, family services and supports for young children. Her book, State of Empowerment: Low Income Families and the New Welfare State (University of Michigan Press), is an in-depth organizational ethnography that examines how publicly funded after-school programs shape the political behavior of low-income parents. She has published in peer-reviewed journals including Policy Studies Journal, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Children Youth Service Review, and Race and Social Problems. Barnes has initiated a new line of interdisciplinary research that examines how social policy implementation reproduces racial inequality in rural southern communities.