Making the Politics of Poverty and Inequality: How Public Policies are Reshaping American Democracy
As disparities in income, earnings, and wealth have risen dramatically in the past 30 years, political debates about poverty and inequality have taken a new shape, resulting in public policies that led to some restructuring of government’s orientation toward the poor. Yet scant attention has been devoted to interpreting how politics influence these public policies, and vice versa. Why do some programs become more deeply entrenched while others do not? What are the repercussions of recent trends in public policy as they interact with the changing contours of social inequality?
To explore this topic, Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Joe Soss will convene a conference at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 21-22, 2005. The conference will address the ways in which policies and their content produce future political agendas; how some policy characters, and their lifespan, differ from others; and how policies affects citizen engagement, political representation, and public accountability. After the conference, Hacker, Mettler, and Soss will compile the papers for publication in the IRP’s research newsletter, Focus, and in an edited volume.