CAN WELFARE POLICY MAKE USE OF SOCIAL NORMS?

Edward J. Bird

Rationality and Society, 1999, vol. 11, issue 3, 343-365

Abstract: Recent literature in social policy proposes that problems like poverty can be reduced by strengthening community norms and other forms of social capital. This paper presents a simple model of social norms, and explores the effects and counter-effects of anti-poverty policies on poverty-related norms. The basic result is to show that the norm system may react in unintended ways: a policy of cutting welfare grants in order to reduce the welfare caseload, for example, can lessen the stigma shown against the poor, in certain cases enough to cause caseloads to rise instead of fall. As a result, strengthening community norms may in some cases do more to frustrate the intentions of policy-makers than to satisfy them.

Keywords: norms; poverty; welfare policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104346399011003004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:11:y:1999:i:3:p:343-365

DOI: 10.1177/104346399011003004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().