Citizenship And Public Policy Research Paper

Conventional forms of citizenship were associated with the modernization of society and with the development of the administrative framework of the modern states. In the nineteenth century, for example in the public policies of Bismarck, there emerged a close relationship between nationalism, social insurance, and state formation. The formation of national identity, political integration, and citizenship were aspects of the modernization of state administrations, and citizenship came to form a basis for the convergence of national and masculine identity ( Nelson 1998). Nineteenth-century nationalism meant that under the orchestration of the nation state, public policy was also cultural policy. However, with globalization, the sovereignty of the state has been compromised, and the modern debate about policy and citizenship has to be set within the political constraints of a global economy.

The concept of citizenship in British social theory has passed through several stages, from the idealism of T. H. Green to the welfare theories of T. H. Marshall and Richard Titmuss. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (1950) and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (1967) have dominated recent debate about social citizenship. The principal question in this tradition has concerned how far a comprehensive welfare policy can be effectively implemented in a capitalist system without either destroying the profitability of capitalist enterprises through excessive taxation or compromising the principles of redistributive justice (Loney et al. 1983). Skeptics of the Marshallian approach have claimed that welfare benefits contributed more to the wellbeing of the middle class than the working class. The contemporary British welfare debate has concentrated on the question of European union, the effects of a centralized bureaucracy, and the possibility of the implementing a social wage.

These policy debates can be contrasted with the American tradition. One might argue controversially that, while the European policy debate has been about the possibility of equality in a capitalist economy, the American legacy, drawing on the work of both Alexis de Tocqueville (1966) and John Dewey (1963), has been concerned with electoral democracy and political access. The Tocquevillian position has been to emphasize the contribution of churches, voluntary associations, and community initiative in the delivery of public policy. However, the distinctively American contribution to public policy has been from pragmatism which, from John Dewey to Richard Rorty (1998), has placed its policy aspirations in the role of education for access and participation (Diggins 1994). It is also important to recognise that philanthropy has played a much larger role in policy development and delivery in America than in Europe (Wuthnow 1996).

In general, citizenship establishes the broad legal and social parameters within which public policy is set, but public policy creates the administrative and legislative framework within which citizens can effectively enjoy their rights. Historically, institutionally, and analytically, citizenship and public policy are interconnected and interdependent. Citizenship is a collection of rights and obligations that gives individuals a formal juridicial identity. Social citizenship involves social membership, a distribution of rewards, the formation of identities, and a set of virtues relating to obligation and responsibility. It is constituted by social institutions such as the jury system, parliament, and welfare states. Whereas the history of political institutions identifies the origins of citizenship with the Greek polis, social citizenship, as the outcome of the American and French Revolutions, is an essentially modern conception. It is analytically a product of modern liberal theory, specifically de Tocqueville’s theory of democratic association.

The social rights of social citizenship are very different in their consequences in contrast with legal and political rights. Social rights require the provision of social services and transfer payments, and as a result involve the state in public expenditure. They also require some administrative structure to deliver these services, and hence further involve the state in fiscal management. Recognition of this fiscal role of the state gave rise to the famous division of welfare by Titmuss (1958) into social welfare (education, health, and social services); fiscal welfare (allowances and relief from taxation); and occupational welfare (benefits received by employees through employment). This provision of social rights clearly illustrates the tensions and contradictions between the state and the market. Radical sociologists like Jurgen Habermas (1976) predicted a ‘legitimation crisis,’ because the growth of state expenditure in response to electoral pressure would necessarily undermine capitalist profitability. One can argue therefore that the neoliberal policies of the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher involved ‘rolling back the state,’ the privatization of welfare, and a return to third-sector involvement through charities, philanthropic institutions, and the voluntary associations. These strategies sought to restore profitability through deregulation, subsidiarity, and community initiatives, but also emphasized the importance of individual and family responsibility for welfare delivery. Conservative critics of bureaucratic welfare argued that welfare benefits undermined the family through payments to single parents, who as a result had no necessary incentive to work and clear incentives not to marry. In the late twentieth century, so-called ‘third-sector strategies,’ which encouraged local initiative, community development, and voluntary sector delivery, became fashionable, not only in North American and Europe but also in Australia and New Zealand (Brown et al. 2000).

The notion of ‘public policy’ also requires some preliminary clarification. It is a general term to describe the efforts of governments to coordinate the provision of a variety of governmental services and utilities. Public policy expresses the political intentions and choices of government, and creates the framework within which social planning takes place. ‘Public policy’ is often referred to as ‘social policy,’ typically when a broader philosophical dimension is involved. Social policy is often distinguished from public policy by its broad welfare dimension; it attempts to regulate the provision of five social services: housing, education, health, social security, and personal social services. The connection between policy and citizenship was overtly expressed by Marshall, who claimed that social policy includes the general policy of governments with regard to action having a direct and explicit impact on the welfare of citizens by providing them with services or income. Social Administration is the science of the provision of such services through social policy, and in Britain it was established as a discipline at the London School of Economics in 1912. In Europe in the 1840s, the growth of social medicine expressed the idea that the health of individuals should involve the state in the policing of society. Public policy and social citizenship have to be understood as aspects of the growth of state administration designed to bring about social order in a world of expanding capitalism.

1. Citizenship And The Rise Of Public Policy

Both citizenship and public policy are modern institutions. Neither social citizenship nor public policy could exist without the nineteenth-century expansion of public administration and law. In pre-modern times, it is clear that the church responded to the satisfaction of need through principles of reciprocity and redistribution. Ecclesiastical responses to poverty and need in the Middle Ages were located within a theological debate about economic exchange in which low wages were interpreted through a moral discourse on justice. The church developed various institutional responses to poverty and created the modern framework of charity (Troeltsch 1912). Before the development of the capitalist market system, the poor could rely on custom and communal organizations for subsistence. In the medieval period, guilds and fraternal associations in the towns provided welfare benefits to members and their dependants. These guilds often evolved into mutual societies and the principles of mutuality often survived the growth of capitalism. In traditional societies, it was the church, the patriarchal family, or the landlord who determined the conditions of survival, rather than the labor contract.

We can see the origins of public policy as a social struggle over the conditions by which markets function. In his classic study of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Esping-Andersen (1990, p. 35) claimed that ‘the mainsprings of modern social policy lie in the process by which both human needs and labor power became commodities and, hence, our wellbeing came to depend on our relation to the cash nexus.’ However, the impact of the market is modified or moderated by the growth of social citizenship which provides, through public policy initiatives, a variety of safety nets to protect the individual from the full vagaries of unemployment, sickness, and disability. With the decline of traditional patterns of social reciprocity, citizenship expressed through public policy reduces the contingencies of dependence on the market.

The historical controversy in the social sciences has been around the capacity of public policy and citizenship to bring about an effective redistribution of resources. There are broadly two views about the historical role of welfare states. Radical critics of capitalism (O’Connor 1973, Piven and Cloward 1972) have argued that public policy aimed at creating social citizenship is primarily concerned with legitimating governments and protecting them from political instability arising from social conflicts, specifically from a revolutionary working class. Liberal theories of welfare (Lipset 1960) argue that welfare policies reduce the material causes of class conflict, incorporate the working class and enhance democratic access to the state. For sociologists like Frank Parkin (1979), social welfare transforms class conflict into status competition. In broad terms, one can conclude that the production of inflationary pressure of welfare benefits from public policy initiatives has been regarded by the state and its elites as more tolerable than civil conflict and revolutionary protest. Whether or not public policies to institutionalize social citizenship have a real effect on social equality will depend on what type of welfare state (if any) is created by government actions, and how these policies have emerged historically in relation to different forms of capitalism.

In recent scholarship, the radical or Marxist paradigms have been less influential, and debate about public policy and government agency has been influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. Social scientists have in particular recognized the importance of Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ as a paradigm for understanding the microprocesses of administration and control within which self-regulation and social regulation are united (Foucault 1991).The concept of ‘governmentality’ provides an integrating theme that is concerned with the sociopolitical practices or technologies by which the self is constructed. ‘Governance’ or ‘governmentality’ refers to the administrative structures of the state , the patterns of self-government of individuals and the regulatory principles of modern society.

Foucault argued that governmentality has become the common foundation of all forms of modern political rationality, that is, the administrative systems of the state have been extended in order to maximize the state’s productive control over demographic processes. This extension of administrative rationality was first concerned with demographic processes of birth, morbidity, and death, and later with the psychological health of the population.

‘Governmentality’ can be seen as an administrative rationality that produces the modern self as a consequence of social services. This perspective has been valuable in understanding the growth, for example, of social gerontology as a science, a component of public policy, and as the basis for new professions to discipline the elderly (Katz 1996).

Foucault’s historical inquiries gave rise to a distinctive notion of power, in which he emphasized the importance of its local or micro manifestations, the role of professional knowledge and expertise in the legitimation of such power relationships, and the productive rather than negative characteristics of the effects of power. His approach can be contrasted usefully with the concept of power in traditional Marxist sociology, where power is visible in terms of the police and army, concentrated in the state, and ultimately explained by the ownership of the economic means of production. In the Marxist perspective, power is typically negative and signifies a system of institutions that contain, prohibit, and control. Foucault’s view of power is more subtle, with an emphasis on the importance of knowledge and information in modern means of surveillance.

‘Governmentality’ is the generic term for these power relations. It was defined as ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target populations’(Foucault 1991, p. 102). The importance of this definition is that the power of the state in the modern period has been less concerned with sovereignty over things (land and wealth) and more concerned with maximizing the productive power of administration over population and reproduction. Furthermore, Foucault interpreted the exercise of administrative power in productive terms, that is enhancing population potential through, for example, state support for the family. For example, the state’s involvement in—and regulation of— reproductive technology is an important example of governmentality in which the desire of couples to reproduce is enhanced through the state’s support of new technologies. The existence of a demand for fertility is supported by a profamilial ideology that regards the normal household as a reproductive social space. These Foucauldian perspectives have been useful in providing an historical understanding of the relationships between family, state, and public policy. Feminist criticism of neoliberal policy to protect the family has noted that these policy initiatives implicitly or explicitly ignore the presence of married women in the labor force (Wilson 1977).

2. The Dimensions Of Citizenship

In historical terms, social citizenship and public policy have been shaped by the relationship between state and market. Public policy attempts to promote a set of general social conditions through which effective entitlement to social resources can be sustained. Welfare has, in practice, never been an unconditional right; entitlements have, in reality, been tied to contribution. The entitlement to benefits in liberal welfare systems have typically been through work, war, and reproduction.

Work was fundamental to the conception of citizenship in the welfare state as described in W. H. Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Ser ices (1942) and Full Employment in a Free Society (1944). Individuals could achieve effective entitlements through the production of goods and services, namely through gainful employment, which was essential for the provision of adequate pensions and superannuation. These entitlements also typically included work care, insurance cover, retirement benefits, and healthcare.

Citizenship for male workers characteristically evolved out of economic conflicts over conditions of employment, remuneration, and retirement .Service to the state through warfare generates a range of entitlements for the soldier–citizen. Wartime service typically leads to special pension rights, health provisions, housing, and education for returning servicemen and their families. War service has been important, as we have seen, in the development of the evolution of social security entitlements (Titmuss 1962).

Finally, people achieve entitlements through the the formation of households and families, which become the mechanisms for the reproduction of society through the birth, maintenance, and socialization of children. These services increasingly include care for the aging and elderly as generational obligations continue to be satisfied through the private sphere (Finch 1989). These services to society through the family provide entitlements to both men and women as parents, that is as reproducers of the nation. These familial entitlements become the basis of family security systems, various forms of support for mothers, and health and educational provision for children. Although the sexual activity of adults in wedlock is regarded in law as a private activity, the state and church have clearly taken a profound interest in the conditions for and consequences of lawful (and more particularly unlawful) sexual activity. Following Foucault, we can argue that heterosexual reproduction has been a principal feature of the regulatory activity of the modern state. It is evident that the values and norms of a household constituted by a married heterosexual couple provides the dominant ideal of British social life , despite the fact that 49 percent of live births in 1998 occurred outside marriage and that among the majority of one-family households 30 percent had no children. In fact, the moral force of the idea of marriage and domesticity is so compulsive in contemporary society that in America a number of states are considering legislation that would enable gay couples to form ‘civil unions,’ entitling them to about 300 rights and benefits currently available under state law to married heterosexual couples.

3. Regulatory Regimes And Public Policy

This liberal pattern of public policy for social citizenship has been eroded because the three foundations of effective entitlement have been transformed by economic, military, and social changes. It may sound perverse to suggest that in contemporary Britain the decline of economic participation has brought about an erosion of citizenship, when participation in the labor force has been rising continuously since the early 1990s. Increasing economic activity has been especially important for women; between 1971 and 1999, the proportion of the adult female population being economically active increased from 56 to 72 percent. However, high levels of economic participation mask a real change in the nature of the economy and obscure a transition from old to new welfare regimes. The new economic regime is based on monetary stability, fiscal control, and a reduction in government regulation of the economy. In this new economic environment, one version of the ‘Third Way strategy’ involves not protecting individuals from the uncertainties of the market that had dominated welfare strategies between 1930 and 1970, but helping people to participate successfully in the market through education (lifelong learning schemes), flexible employment (familyfriendly employment strategies), and tax incentives (Myles and Quadagno 2000). However, while increasing rates of economic activity have been a positive aspect of economic liberalization, much of this in- crease in economic participation has required the casualization of the labor force. While the number of men in part-time employment doubled between 1984 and 1999, radical changes in the labor market ( job sharing, casualization, flexibility, downsizing, and new management strategies) have disrupted work as a career. While for employers functional and numerical flexibility has broken down rigidities in the workplace, these strategies have compromised job security (Abercrombie and Warde 2000, p. 81).

Sociological studies of social class suggest that, while levels of unemployment have been falling in association with the long American economic boom of the 1990s, the contemporary class structure has new components—an ‘underclass’ of the permanently unemployable (typically single-parent welfare claimants), a declining middle class associated with the decline of middle management, and the ‘working poor’ whose skill levels do not permit upward mobility (Sennett 1998). There is some academic consensus that features of the class structure do not encourage active citizenship through economic entitlement, but these changes in the nature of employment are perhaps insignificant when compared to the graying of the population and the social problem of retirement. It is clear that the stereotype of the elderly as a dependent and passive population in disengagement theory is false, but it is also true that the aging of the population has important implications for the shape of the working population and for employment as a basis for entitlement. Intergenerational conflict in the struggle over resources is likely to become an important element in social divisions in this century.

Public policy and social citizenship were aspects of modern state administration that developed in the nineteenth century. We can interpret this administrative complex as a response to social class conflicts in the development of modern capitalism. Social rights were granted as political mechanisms to secure an acceptable level of social solidarity. Walter Bagehot (1963) in his The English Constitution warned in 1867 of the dangers of working class combination, which would result in the ‘supremacy of ignorance,’ and encouraged the ‘higher classes’ to exercise wisdom and foresight. An extension of social rights was a prudent response to the dangers of combination among the ‘lower classes’ and social citizenship has remained a valuable public policy option to avoid civil war. However, social citizenship and capitalism have remained in a state of permanent tensions—as Marshall recognized in his concept of ‘hyphernated society’ in The Right to Welfare and Other Essays (Marshall 1981). There is a permanent tension between the liberal rights of individual freedom in a capitalist marketplace and principles of equity and justice that require state interventions to protect social rights.

Public policy and welfare systems oscillate between different regulatory environments. A regulatory regime may be defined as ‘a historically specific configuration of policies and institutions which structures the relationship between social interests, the state, and economic actors in multiple sectors of the economy’ (Eisner 1993, p. 1). These regimes fluctuate between interventionist welfare systems and deregulated privatized systems. For example, in retrospect, we can see that American public policy passed through different regulatory regimes in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, postwar reconstruction, and the contemporary period. Following the depression, President Roosevelt and his advisors introduced a legislative programme aimed at social and economic recovery. The National Industrial Recovery Act was characteristic of the new policy regime, but the Progressive Era still depended on market forces. The New Deal and postwar reconstruction required an alliance between the state and capital to conduct a global war and then to achieve an economic recovery. In wartime Britain, the social policies of John Maynard Keynes, as expressed in The General Theory of Interest, Employment and Money (1936), were adopted to finance the war. Social Keynesianism also formed the basis for postwar reconstruction where the policy of supporting public works, such as direct investment in infrastructure projects, promoted the recovery of employment. These public policies were in direct opposition to the ‘Treasury view,’ which advocated fiscal constraint and limited government intervention. In the late twentieth century, there was a departure from interventionist policies; environmental controls and workers’ safety are not primary objectives, and were seen to conflict with corporate profitability. In both the USA and UK, there has been a similar history involving a rapid departure from the principles of the New Deal, Social Keynesianism, and the postwar consensus in favour of policies that do not assume, for example, full employment or universal criteria in the provision of pensions.

4. Conclusion: Public Policy And Globalization

This historical pattern of policy options changed significantly in the last two decades of the twentieth century with the emergence of a global economy. Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that globalization has resulted in the decline of national sovereignty ( Hirst and Thompson 1996), it is the case that global economic processes constrain the capacity of national governments to make independent decisions about national public policy. For example, volatile financial markets responding to global information systems can undercut national public policy through the collapse of local currencies. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s was a dramatic illustration of how global uncertainty can destabilize currencies and prevent governments from adhering to public policies that have inflationary consequences. Volatile markets, the fragmentation of public policy by constant restructuring of government agencies and the economy, an emphasis on individual responsibility and subsidiarity, and the recommodification of services through neoliberalism have encouraged some social scientists to argue that public policy has become postmodern (Petersen et al. 1999). A new policy environment may involve the globalization of delivery through global enterprises that provide services for governments under ‘outsourcing’ arrangements. The growth of private prisons, managed by global enterprises, to replace or supplement state prison services would be one example. Social experiments in policy delivery in a global context may not be postmodern, but they will certainly be increasingly translocal. As a consequence, the conventional mixture of state, market, and voluntary sector as the framework of public policy will change radically to reflect the changing circumstances of social citizenship in a global economy.

Bibliography:

1. Abercrombie N, Ward A 2000 Contemporary British Society. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
2. Bagehot W 1963 The English Constitution. Collins, London
3. Barbalet J M 1988 Citizenship. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK
4. Beveridge W H 1942 Social Insurance and Allied Ser ices. HMSO, London
5. Beveridge W H 1944 Full Employment in a Free Society. Allen & Unwin, London
6. Brown K, Kenny S, Turner B S 2000 Rhetorics of Welfare. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK
7. de Tocqueville A 1966 Democracy in America. Doubleday, New York
8. Dewey J 1963 Freedom and Culture. Capricorn, New York
9. Diggins J P 1994 The Promise of Pragmatism. Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
10. Eisner M A 1993 Regulatory Politics in Transition. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
11. Esping-Andersen G 1990 The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
12. Finch J 1989 Family Obligations and Social Change. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
13. Foucault M 1991 ‘Governmentality’. In: Burchell G, Gordon C, Miller P (eds.) The Foucault Eff Studies in Governmentality. Harvester, London, pp. 87–104
14. Habermas J 1976 Legitimation Crisis. Heinemann, London
15. Hirst P, Thompson G 1996 Globalization in Question. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
16. Katz S 1996 Disciplining Old Age. The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, WV
17. Keynes J M 1936 The General Theory of Interest, Employment and Money. Macmillan, London
18. Lipset S M 1960 Political Man. The Social Bases of Politics. Doubleday, Garden City, NY
19. Loney M, Bosell D, Clarke J (eds.) 1983 Social Policy and Social Welfare. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK
20. Mann M 1987 ‘Ruling class strategies and citizenship’. Sociology 21(3): 339–54
21. Marshall T H 1950 Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
22. Marshall T H 1967 Social Policy in the Twentieth Century. Hutchinson, London
23. Marshall T H 1981 The Right to Welfare and Other Essays. Heinemann, London
24. Myles J, Quadagno J 2000 ‘Envisioning a Third Way.’ Contemporary Sociology 29(1): 156–67
25. Myrdal G 1944 The American Dilemma. Harper, New York
26. Nelson D D 1998 National Manhood. Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Duke University Press, Durham, NC
27. O’Connor J 1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. St Martin’s Press, New York
28. Parkin F 1979 Marxism and Class Theory. A Bourgeois Critique. Tavistock, London
29. Petersen A, Barns I, Dudley A, Harris P 1999 Poststructuralism, Citizenship and Social Policy. Routledge, London
30. Piven F, Cloward R A 1972 Regulating the Poor. Tavistock, London
31. Rorty R 1997 Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
32. Sennett R 1998 The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. W W Norton, New York
33. Shklar J N 1991 American Citizenship. The Quest for Inclusion. Harvard University Press, New York
34. Smith R 1997 Civic Ideals. Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
35. Titmuss R 1958 Essays on the Welfare State. Allen & Unwin, London
36. Titmuss R 1962 Income Distribution and Social Change. A Case Study in Criticism. Allen and Union, London
37. Titmuss R 1968 Commitment to Welfare. Allen & Unwin, London
38. Troeltsch E 1912 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
39. Turner B S (ed.) 1993 Citizenship and Social Theory. Sage, London
40. Turner B S 1986 Citizenship and Capitalism. The Debate over Reformism. Allen & Unwin, London
41. Wilson E 1977 Women and the Welfare State. Tavistock, London
42. Wuthnow R 1996 Poor Richard’s Principle. Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business and Money. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ