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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Social security politics
— ideology and reform | | Author(s) | Judie Svihula, Carroll L Estes |
| Journal title | Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 62B, no 2, March 2007 |
| Pages | pp S79-S89 |
| Source | http://www.geron.org |
| Keywords | Social security [generally] ; Social policy ; Law ; Cluster analysis ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Concerning the Social Security debate in the US, this study asks whether ideologies can be identified through the values expressed in that debate, and what the dominant values in this debate were during the Clinton and Bush Jr presidencies. Content and cluster analyses were used to analyse federal legislative hearing testimonies on Social Security reform spanning 11 years. Witnesses consistently expressed six dominant values: advancing the market; self-interest; generational equity; belief in market activity; recommendations for market solutions; and favouring the replacement of Social security with private accounts. Three advocacy coalitions were identified: conservative, progressive, and non-aligned. Conservatives dominated the hearings and were more consistent in their expression of market values when compared to progressives, who expressed social contract values less frequently. Congressional Democrats were inconsistent in upholding Social Security's social contract values. The distribution of testimonies paralleled historical, political and economic events. This research indicates that one can interpret social policies as well as policy options as sets of values, and these as ideological models. The authors anticipate that the coherence on one political ideological view (market) and the relative lack of consistency in another (social contract) will be highly consequential for the future of Social Security, US politics and the public. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-070504248 A |
| Classmark | TYA: TM2: VR: 3YB: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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