Social Security is one of the largest and most important social policies in the United States, touching the lives of virtually every American and paying benefits to over 40 million people each month. Social Security is likely to figure prominently in the 2016 presidential election cycle as fiscal stress on the program guarantees it will return to the national policy agenda soon. Social Security was also on the policy agenda in 2005, as newly re-elected President George W. Bush sought to use his political capital to privatize Social Security. While the 2005 Social Security privatization debates ultimately yielded no policy change, they offer an instructive window into the politics of Social Security for contemporary reform proposals.
Through a close analysis of the debates on the floor of the House and Senate from January to August 2005 as captured on the Congressional Record, I argue that Social Security debates are characterized by a politics of deservingness, which has important implications for the overwhelmingly positive tone of Social Security reform debates as well as the policy outcomes of those debates. Many scholars of Social Security understand the politics of the program to be primarily informed by the electoral motivations of members of Congress and the power of the senior citizen lobby. While I agree this is a significant factor to the politics of the program, I argue the discursive framing used in congressional debates reveals another important, related component to the politics of Social Securityâthe positive framing of program recipients as deserving of the benefits they receive. While often understood as a universal program, I argue the image of the deserving Social Security recipient is also constructed through gender, race, class, and age, best understood through an intersectional analysis. Under the politics of deservingness, Social Security is understood as a promise and defined in opposition to the undeserving realm of welfare. Recipients are framed as beloved members of our own families, as both Democrats and Republicans tell stories of their own parents and grandparents relying on a Social Security check. Recipients are deserving of their benefits whether through need or contribution, as gendered, racialized, and classed notions of work and family inform the politics of deservingness. The power of the politics of deservingness is seen in what it forecloses. No one questions the legitimacy of Social Security beneficiaries or charges them with fraud or abuse of the system.
Yet in 2005, the politics of deservingness did not go unchallenged. Advocates for private account both within Congress and in advocacy policy organizations sought to counter the politics of deservingness not via a frontal assault arguing Social Security recipients are undeserving, but rather by reframing the universal, collective âweâ of the social insurance style Social Security program with a âmeâ of individual rates of return on contributions to the system. This was done not only through an appeal to individual self-interest, but also through the mobilization of gendered and racialized examples that shifted the âusâ to a âthem.â Private account advocates argued, to limited success, that Black men and young âtwenty-first century womenâ would be better off under a system of individual investment accounts. The reframing that gained more traction was a generational challenge to the politics of deservingness. The privatization advocates never questioned whether the older generation deserved their benefits; instead, they elevated the deservingness of grandchildren, pitting the interests in retirement of one generation against another. Although ultimately no policy change resulted, the 2005 Social Security privatization debates are an important window into the politics of deservingness that surrounds Social Security policymaking, and can illuminate important dynamics for the next Social Security debate. The politics of deservingness opens up certain arguments and forecloses others, which in turn makes some policy proposals more politically feasible.
In this chapter, I articulate why understanding Social Security is important and what a deservingness lens adds. I review the literature on Social Security to make the case for the limitations of a singular emphasis on political power to understand the relative stability of the policy and the positive framing of the recipients. I argue for an analysis of the social construction of target populations to understand the politics that surround a policy and introduce the concept of deservingness in the context of the literature on undeservingness in welfare and the two-tiered welfare state. I then introduce the 2005 Social Security debates and the underlying political ideologies which informed them, before laying out the organization of the book.
Social Security Politics: More than Just Political Power
Popular and powerful, Social Security is seen as a great success of US social policy. The social insurance policy form constructs a collective âweâ instead of a âthem,â creating a broad base of support for the program. Social Security touches the lives of most Americans whether through payroll tax contributions or benefits received by loved ones. Social Securityâs inclusivity fosters a âsense of shared political fateâ and contributes to its popularity, as benefits are received by groups âwidely viewed with sympathy and favorâ in the United States such as the elderly and children. 1 Indeed Martha Derthick argues that this is by design, as from the beginning Social Security policymakers were preoccupied with maintaining positive public perceptions of the program. 2
Social Security is popular today, in part due to the powerful senior citizen lobby it constructed. Andrea Campbell shows how Social Security policy helped create the active and powerful senior citizenâs lobby in the United States that now works to maintain and grow the program. Social Security constructed senior citizens as a target population that soon became a powerful political block, as they gained resources to facilitate political participation, and Social Security benefits offered sufficient economic incentives for them to do so. Over time Social Security has increased political participation rates of senior citizens, leading to a disproportionate senior influence over Social Security policymaking and electoral politics in the United States. 3 The power of the senior lobby was evident when, in their classic study of public opinion and Congress, Fay Lomax Cook and Edith Barrett asked members of Congress which constituents they hear from the most on social welfare issues, and found that âan overwhelming number of Congress members mention the elderly and groups representing the elderly.â 4 This is attributed to the active and effective senior citizen organizations, most notably the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and the fact that they represent a large voting constituency.
Social Security is an immensely popular program, not just among senior citizens. Year after year, the overwhelming majority of Americans have said that they want to maintain current levels or increase spending on Social Security, and there has been considerable resistance to any reforms that would reduce guaranteed Social Security benefits in any way, even through reduced cost-of-living increases or increased retirement ages. 5 Indeed Social Security is so popular and the senior citizen lobby is seen as so powerful that Social Security is sometimes called the third rail of American politicsâtouch it and you die. The metaphor refers to the third rail in train systems, which is the exposed electrical conductor carrying high voltage power; stepping on this rail usually results in electrocution. In politics, the phrase emphasizes the political death that can result from the shock of raising controversial ideas in high-powered policy areas, such as Social Security. But Social Security politics are not just informed by electoral concerns.
Deserving and Undeserving Target Populations
While Social Securityâs power and popularity is often attributed to the political power of the senior citizen lobby, the social construction of the target population of Social Security is also an important contributing force to the politics of the program. In their path-breaking article, Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram argue the social construction of a programâs target population, that is the âthe cultural characteristics or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy,â helps determine how costs and benefits are distributed by the program and constructs the politics which surround it, making the social construction of groups a powerful force in the policymaking process. 6 Policymakers face strong pressures to provide benefits to powerful, positively constructed groups and costs or punitive policy to weak, negatively constructed target populations, what we might understand as the deserving and the undeserving. Furthermore, these social constructions are embedded messages in policy, which influence groupsâ orientations toward policy and participation patterns in the political process, indeed Schneider and Ingram argue, âpublic policy is the primary tool through which government acts to exploit, inscribe, entrench, institutionalize, perpetuate, or change social constructions.â 7 These constructions gain legitimacy through policy, as differences become amplified and sometimes institutionalized into long-lasting social, economic, and political divides of the deserving and the undeserving. Revolutionary war veterans are an example of the social construction of deservingness, as the most deserving veterans were separated from the less deserving through pension policies. 8 This is a conscious strategy as advocates for inclusion sometimes divide constituencies into more and less deserving groups in order to make incremental change. 9 The relationship between public policy and social construction is reciprocal. âA changed social construction of deservedness can precipitate change in policy and, alternatively, public policy change can alter constructions.â 10 Joe Soss and Sanford Schram concur that, âPolicies do more than satisfy or dissatisfy; they change basic features of the political landscape. Policies can set political agendas and shape identities and interests. They can influence beliefs about what is possible, desirable, and normal. They can alter conceptions of citizenship and status.â 11 Sometimes policy helps create powerful, positively constructed groups by combining diverse interests into a single target population, as occurred with senior citizens as Social Security recipients.
The social construction of the target population of Social Security can best be understood in the context of the history and development of the program. Social Security is the cornerstone of the two-tiered US welfare state that grew from the Social Security Act of 1935, and gender and race were encoded in the program from the beginning. Barbara Nelson describes the US welfare state as a âtwo-channelâ or two-tiered state, making sharp distinctions between means-tested policies such as welfare and work-related policies like Social Security. This two-tiered welfare state has historically served to reinforce distinctions between men as breadwinners and women as dependents. 12 Linda Gordon argues this divide grew in part out of the marginalization of a female dominated, social-work-oriented vision that predominated in the Progressive Era, in favor of a professional, academic, male vision of social insurance during the New Deal. The Social Security Act, the pinnacle of New Deal policy, created a stratified system of provision in which the social insurance programs like Social Security were superior both in reputation and in benefit level, while public assistance programs like welfare were stigmatized and offered inferior benefits. 13 Tracing the development of US social welfare policy from colonial times to the 1980s, Mimi Abramovitz argues Social Security serves to regulate womenâs domestic and market labor, encouraging womenâs economic dependence on men by enforcing patriarchal family arrangements that place the male breadwinner in the labor force and the female caretaker in the home. 14 Alice Kessler-Harris illuminates how the gendered assumptions that shaped the creation of old-age insurance broke down in the postwar years. She argues that defining âworkâ as encompassing primarily jobs done by whi...