Chapter 10. Social policy: Inequalities, Racism, and Protest

This post by Sean Kippin introduces chapter 10 of Politics and Policymaking in the UK by Paul Cairney and Sean Kippin.

The term ‘social policy’ describes a wide range of concerns, including policy and processes regarding ageing, children, families, education, crime, health, housing, social security and welfare, and social care. A key theme is the study of inequality and inequalities, which is pertinent in the UK owing to the country’s highly unequal social and political system. Policy action could help to address inequalities, such as over class, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, religious, sexuality, disability, and age. Political protest may help to challenge or draw attention to inequalities and demand action to address them. We use our three lenses to these and related issues:

• Policy analysis: How should we analyse inequalities as interconnected policy problems?
• Policy studies: How do policymakers deal with inequalities, including their fleeting attention and the policy response to protests
• Critical policy analysis: Who wins and loses from these developments, and how should we (and policymakers) respond?

The UK has a long history of protest, including against the Poll Tax; Section 28, University tuition fees in England; and government inaction following the Grenfell Fire in 2017. There have also been protests against international phenomena, including led by women over Donald Trump’s election as US President; and a UK variant of the US-formed ‘Black Lives Matter’. These protests emphasise the importance of political activity outside of the UK’s ‘Westminster’ model. Their proponents describe them as essential, while their opponents often characterise them with reference to ‘riots’ or disruption to a ‘law abiding’ public.

Policy analysis: Defining, addressing, and solving inequalities

We explore how policymakers define, identify solutions to, and attempt to solve inequalities:

• Inequality may be identified as a ‘wicked’ problem, with intense contestation over issues such as the severity and urgency of inequalities; their cause, and; which inequalities can be tolerated, or might even be considered just. 
• Some solutions identify structural causes or ‘social determinants’, and propose redistribution, regulation, or a challenge to austerity. Some propose ‘joining up’ government or ‘mainstreaming’ policies to reflect the cross-cutting nature of problems and mitigate against incoherent responses.
• Inequalities are plagued by contestation and ambiguity, with anti-inequality strategies highlighting the potential for high state intervention but a tendency to favour modest intervention, or policies which create more inequalities in practice.

Overall, equity policies are difficult to sustain because

1. policymakers make broad claims for policy changes in the name of equity, but in practice undermine them (see the Conservative government’s “Levelling Up” agenda),
2. they quickly find out that these objectives clash with other, more established and higher priority policies (such as the need to maintain economic growth or maintain electoral support from key voter groups) and
3. most policymakers are unwilling or unable to engage in a direction or step-change in established patterns of policymaking.

The result is too often one of eye-catching promises, followed by modest or no policy change.

Policy studies: the London ‘riots’ in 2011

The events of August 2011 in London help to explore how each aspect of inequalities policy analysis are contested. All can agree that Mark Duggan, a 29 year old British man of mixed race, was killed in Tottenham North London by an on-duty Metropolitan Police officer. Beyond this, every other aspect of what occurred is contested, including:

• The cause of the killing. The Metropolitan Police claimed Duggan was shot because he was armed and dangerous. Their critics note that this fits a pattern of racist and discriminatory behaviour.
• What happened next. Some described a heavy-handed response to protests against police violence, others described ‘rebellions’ or ‘counter conduct’. Other voices, which predominated, characterised it as ‘rioting’, marked by ‘looting’, ‘violence’, and ‘disorder’, summed up by Prime Minister David Cameron’s comment that these were “riots, pure and simple”.
• Whether the riots resulted from structural causes such as inequality, police racism, and austerity on the one hand, or criminality, family breakdown, and moral shortcomings on the part of the rioters on the other.

Policymakers used the criminality narrative to pursue not only a punitive policing and legal response, but also to scale up the ‘Troubled Families’ programme. The latter sought to ‘turn around’ families with ‘entrenched issues’ (such as ‘worklessness’, ‘anti-social behaviour’, and ‘truancy’), in line with David Cameron’s diagnosis of a ‘Broken Society’ and his prescription of a ‘Big Society’.

Critical Policy Analysis

Critical policy analysis combines research to highlight inequalities with advocacy to defend or support marginalised groups. Critical race theory (CRT) emerged to challenge entrenched white supremacy in political, scholarly, academic, and other public institutions, and support intersectional approaches.

To its critics in the US and UK (including in government), CRT represents a threat to politics and society. The UK Government’s alternative focus on ‘race and ethnic disparities’ asked how to advance the ‘progress’ won by the struggles of the past 50 years. This approach sought to dismiss concerns about institutional and systemic racism in favour of a more benign framing, and seemed to justify existing approaches rather than to prefigure substantial policy change.

Inequalities and the Westminster and Complex Government stories

Critics of limited policy progress to reduce inequalities use the Westminster story to hold senior policymakers responsible for failing to act: if they could be bothered to learn about the social determinants of policy problems, and exhibited some political will, they could reduce inequalities in the UK. Instead, they favour platitudes and make problems worse by individualising complex social issues. The complex government story helps to explain the inevitable lack of progress to ‘join up’ policy and policymaking to reduce inequalities. Modern governments may put their faith in ‘holistic’ policymaking to take forward cross-cutting policy agendas to tackle spatial, educational, health or other forms of inequalities, but generally find that their reforms don’t live up to expectations.

Lessons from policy theories for the pursuit of equity in health, education and gender policy

By Paul Cairney, Emily St.Denny, Sean Kippin, Heather Mitchell

This post first appeared on the Policy & Politics blog. It summarizes an article published in Policy & Politics.

Could policy theories help to understand and facilitate the pursuit of equity (or reduction of unfair inequalities)?

We are producing a series of literature reviews to help answer that question, beginning with the study of equity policy and policymaking in health, education, and gender research.

Each field has a broadly similar focus.  Most equity researchers challenge the ‘neoliberal’ approaches to policy that favour low state action in favour of individual responsibility and market forces.   They seek ‘social justice’ approaches, favouring far greater state intervention to address the social and economic causes of unfair inequalities, via redistributive or regulatory measures. They seek policymaking reforms to reflect the fact that most determinants of inequalities are not contained to one policy sector and cannot be solved in policy ‘silos’. Rather, equity policy initiatives should be mainstreamed via collaboration across (and outside of) government. Each field also projects a profound sense of disenchantment with limited progress, including a tendency to describe a too-large gap between their aspirations and actual policy outcomes. They describe high certainty about what needs to happen, but low confidence that equity advocates have the means to achieve it (or to persuade powerful politicians to change course).

Policy theories could offer some practical insights for equity research, but not always offer the lessons that some advocates seek. In particular, health equity researchers seek to translate insights on policy processes into a playbook for action, such as to frame policy problems to generate more attention to inequalities, secure high-level commitment to radical change, and improve the coherence of cross-cutting policy measures. Yet, policy theories are more likely to identify the dominance of unhelpful policy frames, the rarity of radical change, and the strong rationale for uncoordinated policymaking across a large number of venues. Rather than fostering technical fixes with a playbook, they encourage more engagement with the inescapable dilemmas and trade-offs inherent to policy choice. This focus on contestation (such as when defining and addressing policy problems) is more of a feature of education and gender equity research.

While we ask what policy theories have to offer other disciplines, in fact the most useful lessons emerge from cross-disciplinary insights. They highlight two very different approaches to transformational political change. One offers the attractive but misleading option of radical change through non-radical action, by mainstreaming equity initiatives into current arrangements and using a toolbox to make continuous progress. Yet, each review highlights a tendency for radical aims to be co-opted and often used to bolster the rules and practices that protect the status quo. The other offers radical change through overtly political action, fostering continuous contestation to keep the issue high on the policy agenda and challenge co-option. There is no clear step-by-step playbook for this option, since political action in complex policymaking systems is necessarily uncertain and often unrewarding. Still, insights from policy theories and equity research shows that grappling with these challenges is inescapable.

Ultimately, we conclude that advocates of profound social transformation are wasting each other’s time if they seek short-cuts and technical fixes to enduring political problems. Supporters of policy equity should be cautious about any attempt to turn a transformational political project into a technical process containing a ‘toolbox’ or ‘playbook’.

You can read the original research in Policy & Politics:

Paul Cairney, Emily St.Denny, Sean Kippin, and Heather Mitchell (2022) ‘Lessons from policy theories for the pursuit of equity in health, education, and gender policy’, Policy and Politics https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16487239616498

This article is an output of the IMAJINE project, which focuses on addressing inequalities across Europe.