Welfare, Politics, and Folklore: Overcoming the Narrative Bias Against Public Assistance in the U.S.

Abstract:The stories about public assistance that dominate the mass media and the oral tradition of non-aid recipients in the United States paint a particularly negative view of the welfare system and its recipients. Current explanations for these negative views remain incomplete, for the most part ignoring the narratives that both reflect and create these views. General characteristics of narrative performance coupled with specific situational contexts, performance contexts, and stereotypes related to welfare, have contributed to this skewed perspective. Analysis of the oral vernacular tradition further suggests that welfare stories are ideologically predisposed to favor negative views, not least of which because of the dominance of eyewitness accounts that require narrators to establish a binary of us vs. them and fill in narrative gaps with cultural stereotypes and assumptions. An antidote to this ideological bias can be found in the same narrative tradition by shifting from reliance on legends and purported eyewitness accounts to the stories told by aid recipients and providers and sharing them strategically with the help of current research in folklore, communications, and psychology. By attending to narratives that reflect lived experience, advocacy does not require a departure from the data, but rather a reinvestment in it.