The Remarkable "Quango": Knowledge, Politics, and Welfare Reform

Abstract

This paper describes the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 (FSA), focusing on the politics of welfare reform. It considers especially the role played by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's assessments of experimental state programs designed to move welfare recipients out of dependency. The paper argues that those assessments were pivotal to the passage of FSA and that they demonstrate the growing potential power of policy research. It also argues that achieving that potential required conditions not often found together: timely and clearly relevant findings based on convincing research methods employed by an organization regarded as impartial, and the lucid and persistent presentation of those findings in many forms and at many forums.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.