Discourse on Destitution: Computationally Examining Policymakers’ Debates About Poverty Over the Last Century

• In Event: Culture and Inequality

Abstract

The collection of social policies addressing poverty in the United States has transformed substantially since the first economic support programs were established at the state level. Much of the literature on the American welfare state has documented these changes and identified recurring normative and ideological themes in the construction of the modern safety net. Policymakers' conceptions of poverty and those living in it partially guide the creation of poverty-alleviating policies, yet debates over the evolution, articulation, and durability of those ideas remain unsettled. This article seeks to advance these debates by studying policymakers' expressions of these ideas within the institutional contexts from which the modern safety net arose. Relying on à la carte (ALC) embeddings methods of computational text analysis, I analyze a large corpus of lawmakers' speeches from the Congressional Record given between 1911 and 2017. These analyses reveal marked pivot points in the discourse on poverty occurring during the 1960s and subsequent decades: lawmakers shifted from framing poverty as a condition of society and instead began presenting it as a quantifiable, individual experience. I also uncover continuities and shifts in the rhetorical framing of other poverty-related concepts and populations historically associated with the safety net. My findings provide empirical evidence of changes in the conceptual underpinnings of lawmakers' attempts to address poverty over the last century.

Author

• Jabari M Cook, Princeton University