The Force of Ideas

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Major changes in public policy are driven by changesin thinking. Most policy changes are incremental, buton occasion there is a fundamental shift. Mostscholars attempt to explain these shifts withreference to events at the foreground of politics, but I argue that radical policy change occurs onlywhen the definition of the problem itself has firstchanged. I show that such a shift in problemdefinition was key to the passage of welfare reformin 1996. Across the political spectrum, thedefinition of poverty shifted from being a lack ofincome to being a set of behaviors. Adapting toolsfrom computational linguistics, I show that over a 20year period poverty talk in Congressional hearingsand press accounts shifted from being about societalfailure to provide human capital and equitable socialstructures, to being about moral hazards created byefforts to help the poor and the behavior of the poorthemselves. This shift toward "behavioral talk" wasin place years before the Republican take over inCongress and is seen across the political spectrum.Ultimately, conservatives won the war over welfarereform because they had first won the battle todefine the question.