Recent work on the welfare state has largely focused on the role of welfare programs in state economies—their redistributive functions and their role in managing incentives for work. Reflexive Democracy marks a much-needed shift in focus, offering an analysis and then a reconstruction of the relationship between welfare programs and citizen participation.
Kevin Olson describes his project as an attempt to reconceptualize welfare using political rather than redistributive criteria. This is an ambitious undertaking in which he largely succeeds. To begin, he wants to “reveal deep-seated egalitarian norms at the heart of the welfare state—norms derived not from economic, but political equality” (p. 7). This empirical analysis then serves as the basis for “carefully reconfigured ideals of political equality, democratic legitimacy and citizenship” (p. 7). As is consistent with the tradition of work influenced by Jürgen Habermas, Olson is committed to realizing the normative project through a critical analysis of social and political practice.
At the root of Olson's reconstruction is a fairly straightforward claim about the material bases of democratic equality. Because there is a demonstrable relationship between economic disadvantage and political participation, if we take seriously our commitment to democracy we must take equally seriously our need to support a welfare state that provides the relative equality and security that appear to be a precondition for it. The author demonstrates the depth of his commitment to democracy when he further argues that we must make participation central to the construction and regulation of welfare programs as well. Yet his is not so much an argument that it is “democracy all the way down” as it is an argument that it is democracy all the way around—that is, he avoids the foundationalist dilemma, taking existing practices, specifically the contradictory nature of such practices, as an immanent source of critique.
This is a key attraction of Olson's work—his normative claims for participation emerge not from a purely philosophical reflection but rather from citizen's actual practices, and are the result of neither philosophical nor political imposition. Olson anticipates the question that naturally arises next: In what sense is a project that sees itself as “revealing” already existing deep-seated egalitarian norms that “arise from citizen's actual practice” a critical project? The critical force of his argument rests on his ability to persuasively draw the distinction between his notion of reflexivity and mere circularity: “It [reflexivity] holds up a mirror to those societies without simply reflecting back the image they are used to seeing. The mirror in this case reveals widespread distortions in our internalized self-image. We see ourselves as democratic, egalitarian societies created for the mutual benefit of all members. Yet we systematically ignore inconsistencies in this view, particularly the extent to which some voices are allowed to dominate political and cultural discussions while others remain quiet” (p. 202). Reflexivity, then, seems to rely on some mechanism for holding people accountable to reconcile their contradictions or distortions.
Olson suggests a potential site of such “reflexivity” as he reviews both historical work and contemporary work on citizen attitudes toward equality. In the American context, Jennifer Hochschild's (1981) What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice and Martin Gilens's (1999) Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy provide work that Olson sees as suggesting the complexity and “confusion of people's intuitions about equality” (p. 193). Survey research suggests that the vast majority of Americans incorrectly depict welfare recipients as predominantly African American, and Gilens links their reluctance to support Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs to racist attitudes about the work ethic. Hochschild's interview work demonstrates both the strength of American commitments to an egalitarian norm in political life and Americans' resistance to it in economic life. Such attitudes, to be consistent, require strong boundary distinctions between the political and economic spheres—boundary distinctions that are difficult to defend in the face of research on participation that illustrates, for example, a significant inverse relationship between income and political participation.
Olson explores both the more immediate and the long-standing consequences of this relationship: unequal voice and unequal “capabilities” for participatory engagement. Reflexive democracy would remedy these inequalities with a more expansive understanding of social rights, as necessary features of equal citizenship and not merely contingent upon empirically demonstrable disadvantage, and with a participatory ideal that maintains two core commitments: 1) the use of agency-supporting policies to promote participation and 2) the idea that agency-supporting policies should result from participation (p. 98). Ultimately, a reflexive democratic state “allows citizens to become equal in their cooperative interdependence…. [It is] centered on promoting agency rather than simply equalizing the possession of goods and resources” (p. 20).
The conceptual interconnections among the participatory ideal, democratic legitimacy, and citizenship are admirably negotiated in Olson's work. Yet I think he may, in light of his commitment to a political justification for the welfare state, have incurred a debt to extend his analysis. The development of reflexive democracy and of institutions and laws to remedy existing inequalities hinges on making contradictions, many of which have an enduring history, unendurable. This is ultimately a political project. Calling attention to the contradictory nature of our commitments to equality without also attending to the ways these contradictions have been maintained leaves much of the work of restructuring the welfare state undone.
While the justificatory framework for Olson's argument is both persuasive and useful, his argument for change would be strengthened with a closer consideration of the way systems of structural privilege not only thwart the development of some capabilities but also shape motivations and interests consistent with maintaining patterns of exclusion and nonparticipation, as well as fostering alternative sites for and patterns of participation. He frames his own critique of the existing welfare state around patterns of convergence between disadvantage and nonparticipation. Yet as some more recent empirical work on the welfare state suggests, patterns of participation on the part of the disadvantaged are complicated (e.g., see Joe Soss, Unwanted Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System, 2000; John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor, 2001). Work like this does not undermine Olson's vision of reflexive democracy. It supplements its central strength: connecting our normative claims to citizen's actual practices. Reflexive Democracy makes a critical contribution to our rethinking of these practices.
