Tripodi Lecture: Dr. Carolyn Barnes on "It's Who You Know — Race, Poverty, and Social Policy in the Rural South"

Transcript

Lia Swindle: Okay, welcome everyone. I'm just gonna go through a few housekeeping issues before we get started. We'll ask that everybody please make sure you're muted throughout the presentation. We'll be doing Q&A at the end, but please feel free to put your questions into the chat during the presentation, if you'd like, and we'll keep track of them. And otherwise you'll be a able to unmute yourself at the end, if you would like to ask Dr. Barnes questions. Other than that, I'd like to introduce Dean Burton to start off the lecture.

Dean Linda Burton: Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon for our 10th Tripodi Lecture in Research for Methodology. Just a little bit about to begin the Tripodi Lecture Series. It was established through a generous gift from Tony Tripodi, Dr. Tripodi received his VA and MSW from the University of California Berkeley, before going on to complete his doctorate in social welfare from Columbia University, he served as dean of Ohio State University College of Social Work from 1993 to 2005, and taught at a number of institutions throughout the United States, including UC Berkeley. Throughout his career, he was especially involved in research methodology. We are grateful for his support in establishing this endowment, allowing Berkeley Social Welfare to continue educating people on research topics relevant to social welfare.

Before I provide the introduction to the wonderful Dr. Carolyn Barnes, I will just recount our land acknowledgement. We would like to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo, Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. Since the institution's founding in 1868, consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make physical the university's relationship to native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous people.

Now to begin in introducing you to Carolyn Barnes, Carolyn Barnes is an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research agenda broadly explores the social and political implications of social policy on low income populations in the areas of childcare, family services and supports for young children, her book, "State of Empowerment, Low Income Families and the Welfare State", is an in-depth organizational ethnography that examines how publicly funded after school programs shape the political behavior of low income parents. She is published in peer review journals, including the "Policy Studies Journal", the "Journal of Public Administration, Research and Theory". "Children Youth Services Reviewed", and "Race and Social Problems". Carolyn has initiated a new line of interdisciplinary research that examines how social policy implementation reproduces racial inequality in rural Southern communities. Carolyn's research has been supported by the William P. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Blue Cross Foundation of North Carolina, the Wallace Foundation, and several family foundations. She completed a PhD in political science and public policy from the University of Michigan, where she worked as an affiliate of the National Poverty Center, conducting research on the effects of nonprofit community based service provision on parenting practices and psychosocial wellbeing of families and children.

I do want to add before Carolyn begins that Carolyn is also quite special to me. She is one of my just illustrious mentees who does just incredible, has done such incredible work so early in her career, she is a phenomenal ethnographer and just brilliant in her insights in terms of interpreting what goes on in organizations that affect the lives of many of the disenfranchised people within our country. Carolyn, we welcome you here to Berkeley. We hope you enjoy your time here. And I hope that all of you enjoy your presentation. So I'll turn it over to you now, Carolyn.

Dr. Carolyn Barnes: Thank you, Linda. Okay, hopefully I don't mess this up. I'm gonna share, share my screen. I'm sharing it. And then I'm going to play the, everybody can see that? Great. So thank you, Linda, so much for that introduction and Leah for your patience with me in organizing this talk, as Linda mentioned, I'm Carolyn and I'm an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke. And I study how policies are designed, implemented and accessed by vulnerable populations.

So before we get started, I'm gonna do a shameless plug of my book. As Linda mention, I had a book come out. I can't believe it's been two years already, but I had a book come out a couple years ago called "State of Empowerment, Low Income Families in the New Welfare State". I used the case of school-aged childcare to demonstrate some new trends in social policy design, like market logic and social service delivery, decentralized service delivery and programs that incorporate participant feedback into program design. And I show how these different features of the new welfare state can empower low income parents to participate in civic and political engagement at the local level. So it was a super fun book to write. It's an ethnography of after school programs. So it involve a lot of hanging out with 10 year olds and reading books to kindergartners and attending parent meetings and doing community work. I view it as a positive spin on what's a pretty negative turn in social policy. So typically when we read about means tested assistance programs, scholars tend to point to the negative encounters that folks are having with these programs in their efforts to access them. But I add a little nuance trying and identify some conditions under which we might see positive experiences. So if you are interested, I encourage you to click on the link or screenshot the link 'cause it's open access. So it's free. So enjoy and cite why, but I'm not gonna talk about that book today. I'm gonna talk about a new book project for which I'm rounding out some data collection. And that is the topic of today's talk.

So for some background, I'm a native North Carolinian. I grew up in rural East North Carolina, although I do not sound like it after many years of being in the Midwest. And I was excited to return home to North Carolina when I started my job at Duke, I started this project seven years ago. So I was visiting a bunch of rural county health departments and social services offices. And I was interviewing WIC workers, SNAP workers, Medicaid workers, and everybody in between. And the first question that I'd ask them is to tell me a little bit about themselves. How long have you lived here? How long have you lived in this county? How long have you lived in this town? And I would ask them to describe how their communities can you have changed over time and how their communities shaped the way they did their work. And what I heard was surprising. So instead of hearing pat answers about not having enough resources and having too many clients or, pat answers about the good old days and what kids these days are doing and how the community has changed, people repeatedly talked about a rigid social order. They recounted stories about power and oppression and they clarified who were the haves and who were the have nots and how the haves or the elite of these communities continued to disadvantage others. And they also repeatedly used this term it's who you know when describing the social order. So that's where the title of the book comes from.

So it became very, very clear to me that workers viewed an entrenched white power structure as shaping in many ways and in many ways undermining their capacity to do their work. So the purpose of today's talk is to walk you through a story about how the welfare state becomes a tool for white elites to maintain a social order and to reinforce racial disparities in poverty.

So I wanna be clear, this is still a work in progress, but I'm gonna present the broader theoretical framework that I'm developing on the data that I've collected thus far. And I welcome your feedback.

So here is my first slide that is sort of demonstrating some key differences in rural and urban poverty. So as you can see in the Northeast and Midwest, the differences between rural and urban poverty are pretty small, but when we get to the West and the South, we see some differences kind of grow. So in the Midwest or excuse me in the West, rural poverty is at 16.2% in 2018 in comparison to urban poverty, which is at 13.5%. And in the South we see an even greater divide, where 20.5% of folks in the rural South are in poverty in comparison to 14.4%.

Now this graph breaks poverty down by race and metropolitan status. So you get to see the racial breakdown. So rural poverty is higher than urban poverty for all racial groups, but rural poverty for racial minorities, dwarfs urban poverty for these groups. So over 30% of African Americans and Native Americans rural communities live in poverty, 23.8% of Latinos live in poverty in rural communities while only 13 to 14% of whites live in poverty in rural communities and the racial disparities of poverty widens specifically in rural communities. So we know that 60% of African Americans live in the South and rural Southern communities have become new destinations for Hispanic and Latinx immigrants. So the poverty that we see in the rural South is largely driven by the high poverty rates among racial minorities, and these patterns of poverty aren't new. They have been the topic of research for sociologists and economists alike for a while. Rural sociologists tend to point to the distinct features of rural communities that contribute to these high poverty rates.

So as I mentioned, this rigid stratification where there's a limited social mobility, there's not a lot of patterns of intergenerational mobility in rural communities. And a part of that is due to the nature of insular social networks. So one of the things that I learned as I was doing much of this data collection is that economic opportunities really depended on the strong rather than the weak social ties folks had in the community. So family reputation really mattered, who you went to church with really mattered, who you grew up with really mattered. And on top of that, everyone knows everybody, right? So it's not just that these insular networks are important on how you access opportunities. They're very, very salient to everyone in the community.

So in addition to the rigid stratification, that's maintained through these insular networks. We also have this economic decline and that's happened in the past 30 years due to restructuring or the globalization in technology trends that have prompted a demise in manufacturing and extractive industries. So we see the rise of service industries in lieu of the good factory jobs. And on top of that, because there aren't high skilled jobs or opportunities in rural communities, you also see a brain drain. So the talented youth that would otherwise return to their communities for good paying jobs are leaving to other urban communities or suburban communities for work. And then finally one characteristic that's been lifted up in the literature is the role of powerful families in controlling resources and who these families are and how they exercise their control depends on the region. So it could be tourism and hospitality. It could be agriculture, it could be an extractive industry, or it could be manufacturing, But there are very few studies to date that really put the pieces together in terms of the welfare state and these unique characteristics of rural Southern communities. So we don't really know how the features of rural Southern communities are shaping the way the welfare state operates or how policies implemented in these communities to reinforce or transform these disparities.

So that led me to a set of questions, how the distinct features of rural communities shape how public welfare agencies function in the rural South, and how do these agencies alleviate or contribute to economic stratification? Oops. So why North Carolina? Well, at the time that I started this study, poverty had not yet fallen into pre-recession levels in North Carolina. So North Carolina was lagging behind other Southern states in recovery from the recession. So the North Carolina poverty rate outpaced the national poverty rate, as you can see in 2018 North Carolina's poverty rate was 14.7 in comparison to 12.3% in the US population being at or below the poverty line, and there are those wide racial disparities in poverty. So I showed you the national trends, but if we were to break down North Carolina's racial gaps in poverty, we would see something very similar. And most of the poverty that we see in North Carolina is concentrated in rural communities. So North Carolina, it looks like a lot of rural Southern states. It looks like a lot of rural communities that are struggling economically and have persistent poverty along racial groups. And then on top of that, North Carolina is one of 10 states that's devolved administrative authority to county level government.

So if you are a student of welfare reform, you know that there is a devolution revolution in the mid nineties, that empowered states to determine a lot more on the eligibility requirements and generosity of some of their social programs in particular, the cash assistance program, but some of that decentralization or that devolution has spilled over to other means tested programs like SNAP, like Medicaid and North Carolina is one of those states that's given counties a lot of discretion in how those policies are implemented, in particular counties are responsible for a portion of the administrative costs of delivering those programs and I'll expound on why that's important when we get through to the next couple of slides. And then another reason why I've chosen North Carolina as a case is because the vestiges of the landed gentry still dominate county government and economic development. North Carolina is a place where if you drive, if you drive maybe 30 to 50 miles out of any urban center and by urban center, I mean the Durham or the Charlotte area, you're going to run into a town where people can trace power, people can trace power through family lineage, and people can tell you who's in control. So slavery though, it was so long ago, and we know that slavery still shows up. The consequences of slavery still shows up in contemporary society. It is especially salient in these small towns and in these rural counties in North Carolina.

So what's my method? It is a mix of an organizational and community ethnography. I spent a lot of time on three counties over the past, now seven years conducting participant observations in social service agencies and in communities. And this included going to church services, going to community events, going to community leaders and informants barbecues and kickbacks, and going to local public schools doing observations in those settings. In addition to completing 94 worker interviews across a range of means tested programs, talking to 141 program beneficiaries and conducting 30 community stakeholder interviews, some of which are in progress now. I also draw from historical documents and some administrative data to examine how these power structures are undermining performance and delivering means tested assistance.

So here are what the three counties look like. We have granite Cabes and Fenner. So, Granite and Cabes are the two rural counties. And Granite is about 40,000 folks. 67% of those are white, nearly 30% are African American, and 5% are Hispanic. What I want you to notice about the two rural counties that I've selected is that they're experiencing pretty high poverty. So more than 20% of the county's population are impoverished and they're racially diverse. So we have more than 20% of these counties being African American or Hispanic. So tho those were the selection criteria because the literature suggests when there's enough racial diversity, there's an incentive for social control through political power. So I selected counties that sort of revealed that.

Now, Cabes County is another rural county where 50% of the county's population is white. 40% is African American. 8% is Hispanic. The median household income is about 38,000. And the poverty rate is around 23%. Fenner County is a metropolitan county with 900,000 residents, 57% being white, 33% being African American and 14% being Latino. The median household income is $64,000 a year, and the poverty rate's around 10%. So the poverty rate's actually a little lower than the national poverty rate. And here the poverty rates by county by race. So in the two rural counties, so Granite and Cabes, we see these big jumps in terms of the racial disparities, relative to white folks in these counties, African American and Native American and Hispanic or Latino folks are experiencing two to three times more higher rates I should say of poverty relative to white folks in these counties. So for example, in Granite County, 14% of whites are in poverty in comparison to 33% of African Americans and 30% of Native Americans and 34% of Hispanic or Latinos. If we compare white rural poverty in Cabes versus other racial groups, 11% of white folks in Cabes County are experiencing poverty in comparison to 30% and 49% of Native Americans and 53% of Hispanic or Latino folks. So the gaps are pretty wide, the gaps exist for Fenner. So there are racial disparities in poverty in this urban county, but as you can see, the disparities in these rural counties are dwarfing what we're seeing in the urban counties. So 6% of whites in Fenner County, the metropolitan county, that's experiencing poverty in comparison to 17%, 23% and 24% for black Native American and Hispanic or Latino. So that's the racial makeup of the counties.

So what's the method that I bring to the table in addition to taking an ethnographic approach in terms of how I'm thinking through the theories and how I'm analyzing the data. As I collect it, I use an interpretive method, through sort of a public policy framework. A lot of folks have different views of what an interpretivist or an interpretive method means based on their discipline, but I'm coming from the public policy, public administration space. And that sort of prioritizes an abductive way of engaging analysis, which allows you to do some deductive things or pulling from some existing theory all the while being open to emergent or inductive ways of understanding realities. So I'm pulling from the social stratification theory, which asserts that elites are accumulating political power and economic resources. I'm also incorporating street level bureaucracy that examines how bureaucrats are making decisions based on their context. And then I'm pulling in the administrative burden of research, which I've done quite a bit of work in that really analyzes how people are facing burdens and accessing benefits. And I'm connecting that to the kinds of hardships that families might face when they're not able to access benefits. So a drawing from these three literatures, I'm combining a deductive and inductive analysis, and this is all iterative. So again, as I mentioned, this is a work in progress, and I really do welcome your feedback and helping me sort of think through the findings.

So here's the social order of the rural counties. This is just a sort of a draft of how I'm thinking about the social order. So we have the white landed elite at the top, they're a small group. Then we have the white middle class. We have the black working class, we have rural poor whites. And then we have the rural poor that are African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. So the book demonstrates how DSS, so DSS, I refer to as Department of Social Services. So DSS ends up reinforcing that social order that you just saw. So here's the emergent framework, landed elites control economic opportunities in the community while simultaneously controlling the budget constraints of DSS. DSS then offers employment to the middle class while bullying the low wage service industry by bringing revenue into local retail and businesses that offer low wage work. So on the flip side, DSS is offering public assistance programs that supplement these low wages. So landed elite are controlling economic opportunity for the middle class. And they're also controlling the purse strings of DSS. DSS is supplying low wage work through local revenue while also supplementing the wages, the low wages that folks are receiving through means tested assistance. Okay, so that sounds a little complicated, but I promise you you'll see how this works in the quotes.

So here's an example of how white landed elite serve as a nexus of economic and political power. So this is coming from a, let's see, this is coming from a worker that I interviewed. And she says, when I ask her to describe her community, she says, "The ones who have always thrived, continue to thrive, and the ones who have always struggled continue to struggle. You have certain families who have been in Millsville, that's the county seat for Granite. And those were also the families that were plantation owners. They're also the families that had money back then. They just continued to help their own, old money controls what comes in and what doesn't come in. So it's that that will hold the county back from growing." So this worker is explaining who's in control, these old moneyed families that owned slaves, these plantation owners and how they're continuing to constrain the county from growing economically in the present.

A similar pattern emerged in another county seat. This worker describes old money, which is rooted in land and agriculture, how it controls economic development and social interactions. So she describes old money as contribute to the fact that this county is a shell of what it used to be. That's the term that she used, like old money. Like they got it. You're only gonna shop here. You're only gonna do this specifically here, and you're only gonna deal with certain people. So they kind of run the stuff, they're really running the town. So old money is exerting economic influence. And in this case, they're also exerting dimensions of social control. They're almost totally controlling everyday life. So old money is determining where you work, where you shop and who you interact with. So they're the nexus of economic and political power in these two counties. So I've demonstrated how landed elite are controlling economic opportunity.

Now you might ask, how do they exert control over DSS? Oh, hold on right quick. Here's some other example of how white landed elite are constraining economic development. So we have even more evidence before I move on to how they're controlling DSS. Here's an example. "It's not a lot of educated people here because of the fact that there's no jobs here. We've had seven plants that's closed down." So back to the economic restructuring component. "We've had seven plants that's closed down. I mean, half the people here barely have a high school education. There's just no reason for people to live here. It's not a lot of room for growth, our county commissioners and city council, so it's political power, and all of that stuff, it's still very old fashioned, an old way of thinking. It took us forever to get Lowe's because they didn't wanna upset the guy who had done wood in the town because he's one of the money makers of this town." And this is a Medicaid worker who again, is responding to the question of how would you describe your community? So clearly this social order and who has power and who has control is especially salient.

So here's another example of white elite constraining economic development. "There are no jobs here. The only thing is here is a lot of family owned businesses by white people. So they employ their family members. So to be an outsider to try to get in, if you don't look like them, you're not getting a job. You're not gonna get a job unless it's like fast food maybe. So again, the service industries, the chances are slim to none, unless you know someone, Little Caesars, McDonald's, yeah, you can get a job like that, but you're not gonna get a job that can support you to live independently. Those kinds of jobs are not for black people." So here's another, this is a community member that's describing the social order of the day who has power and how they exercise that power to determine economic opportunities.

Okay, now we're getting to how they control DSS. So I've demonstrated how the landed elite control economic opportunities. You might be curious as to how they exert power over DSS. 'Cause that is an interesting question. Now I mentioned earlier that North Carolina's one of 10 states that have a county run service delivery system. And this matters because of cost sharing agreements around the administration of federal programs. So what some of you may or may not know is that the federal government will cover the cost of benefits or the amount of benefits for programs like Medicaid or SNAP, but they have a cost sharing agreement over the administration of those programs that require states to cover 50% of those administrative costs. Now North Carolina is one of a few states that have pushed those costs down to counties. So counties are picking up the tab on the administration of a lot of the federal programs, which means that counties are having to raise money to ensure high quality service delivery. They're raising money to invest in professional development and training. They're raising money to invest in software and administrative systems. They're also raising money to fill positions. So all of these things are the county's job and it really shapes the degree to which workers can deliver services. So that's how this matters. The landed elite through their power and county level government and the way that the federal government has set up cost sharing agreements, they really are exercising a lot of influence in how DSS runs in communities. So you end up having local white elites control the county board of commissioners, and some of those commissioners end up serving on DSS boards. So every Department of Social Services has a board. So they're influencing agency decisions. They're also determining DSS, the DSS budget and tax rates. So when white elites end up resisting tax raises that would raise revenue for social services, they're compromising the quality of service delivery.

So here's how I learned this. This is a conversation I had with the director of one of these agencies. He goes on to say, this is Albert. He goes on to say, "They will not change the taxing value. The commissioners won't. They have to vote on it, if they just do for one cent, well, what's that gonna cost? I believe it's those who own 300 plus acres, 600 acres, all of that stuff. It would affect them a whole lot. So again, land ownership and political power. There's a lot of money in there. So yeah, you cannot continue to operate." This director's saying he, "Cannot continue to operate his agency without increasing the tax, but they just won't. One of the commissioners, Commissioner Smith, I think he has the family farm. And I think that's kind of one of the influencers." So he's connecting political power to land ownership, and demonstrating how these white elites are constraining progress in his capacity to operate his agency because they won't raise revenue and they gotta raise revenue because in North Carolina, we do it that way. They're covering 50% of the cost of delivering federal programs.

So here's another example. This demonstrates other ways that the landed elite are controlling the quality of the workforce. So in addition to raising money to add a worker, counties also have discretion on salary levels. So this worker is describing how the salary hasn't increased in this county and they can't keep and retain talented workers because workers could go to an urban county that'll pay more. Again, back to the county discretion thing. So she's talking about the white elite. The white elite, "They have stunted the growth of Windel, Windel doesn't change." This is a county seat. "Windel doesn't don't like to change so old money won't allow change. You'd be surprised who owns what and the mentality of how things are done. This agency, how many places you know get paid once a month in this era? Not many. How many places you know go so long without a cost of living increase. And it's hard to recruit people because you have young people that have debt when they come out of school. So money motivates you to where you wanna work and how long you're gonna stay there. And they don't mind jumping ship if money talks, okay. I haven't been there that long. What have I invested? I'm gone." So she can't keep talented workers in the agency because county level government, these white elites are controlling, they're using their discretion to determine salary, raises, cost of living raises, you can't attract and keep talented workers that would deliver high quality services.

So I've demonstrated how the landed elite are shaping economic opportunities now, and I've demonstrated how landed elite are shaping the budget strings of DSS. Now I'm gonna show you how they're creating economic opportunities for the middle class and how they're creating economic opportunities for low income folks.

So this is Albert again, talking about a conversation he had with a commissioner. He is describing DSS as a way of, again, bullying the low wage economy and communities. He describes it as a necessary evil. "I had a conversation with a former commissioner and he said this to my face. He says 'You know, Albert, DSS is a necessary evil.' And I just kind of looked at him, but I was like, well, damn, what does that mean? We do about $10 million a year in food stamps. Well, if you're on food stamps, more than likely, you're not gonna go to Sam's or Costco in the next county over to get your food. You're going to do something here locally. So we're putting at least 10 million into the local economy here, which is, we have two Food Lions and a Walmart, a Super Walmart, even IGA, little small community stores." So Albert is talking to a commissioner who is a member of the white elite. And he is describing the agency and the work that it does in the community as a necessary evil, necessary evil in that it provides revenue for local businesses, local retailers, it's providing $70 million in Medicaid for local businesses. It's bringing in revenue into the local community and providing employment for low wage workers.

Now here's how DSS is employing middle class elite, "In this community, in this county, if you're not working if the power plant, the school system or any other type, this is kind of what everyone wants to go to, DSS. So yeah, it's hard to get in here. People are looking for work and they were looking not just for work, but stable work. DSS is not going anywhere. When the economy tanks we're at our busiest." This is an agency supervisor that's talking about this. So one of the things that happen when you have these elite families that are controlling the purse strings, and they're also controlling economic opportunity is that you have county level employment becoming more and more attractive because it's stable and it offers benefits. So as county employment becomes more attractive and white elites are working to pull the purse strings of the agency, it's harder and harder to get in. And this is when we see the importance of these strong social networks popping up, right? So if you can't get into DSS by just applying, you're gonna get into DSS based on who you know. So here's an agency supervisor describing what employment at DSS means. So she says, "It's a paycheck." So people are really looking for stability when they're coming to DSS, this is not about public service motivation. This is not about an intrinsic way of giving back to the community. This is not about their social identities as bureaucrats. This is about a paycheck. This is about stability in a local economy that is unstable and only offers service industry work. It's a paycheck. And then they think about state retirement or government retirement. I hear all those types of things, but not really "I love my job. I can't wait to get to work," but it's like, well, "this is a job." It pays my bills. I know if I retire, I have county government and state government retirement.

Okay, let me go. So I demonstrated economic opportunities, how landed elite are controlling economic opportunities, how landed elite are controlling DSS, what this means for the local economy and low wage work and what this means for middle class elites who somehow end up landing a job at DSS. So what does this mean in terms of the consequences? So DSS ends up employing the middle class while simultaneously burdening the poor. So because of scarce employment, DSS workers are gaining entree into the agency, through their family and social networks, through those strong ties. So as a consequence, the workforce is not well trained. They're not very professional and they're not motivated to provide high quality services. So what happens is you have, for example, a Medicaid unit or a SNAP unit that got their jobs primarily through their social networks, rather than their professional credentials and training, they end up having to interpret complicated policies to stay abreast of policy changes and fail to do so very well.

So federal performance indicators, like the time it takes for you to process an application or the percentage of the caseload or the applications you've received that are processed within federal guidelines, the timeline, the deadline, or error rates, did you overpay? Did you underpay out benefits? A lot of workers failed to meet the federal performance standards and they end up going under corrective actions. So county agencies will go under corrective action where the state has to review county level performance on these indicators, and they audit the county. And what happens when a county gets audited is that they end up losing more resources. They have to pay for the audit. They have to pay for the state to come in and review records and put in place workers that can deliver services.

So here's an example of DSS employment being contingent upon these strong social social ties. "A lot of times it seems like certain people are already picked to go into a position beforehand. It's just floored some of us totally because some people don't have any experience at all, and they'll automatically get certain positions that they've never even had any training on for that job before. And I just don't see how that can happen, but that has happened a number of times. It's because of who they know who they're related to, and they could have known them, they could have grew up here. They could have known them for a long time." So DSS employment is scarce. There's a status associated to working for the county. It provides stability in , a local economy that's hurting and a local economy that's constrained by the actions of white elite. You get your job by who you know, and it doesn't mean that you're the most qualified person to do the job.

So what does this mean for the folks that I talked about at the beginning, those who are struggling, the folks that are experiencing poverty in rural communities, which are primarily families of color, it means that they're excluded from economic opportunity based on who they know, if they don't come from the right families, if they don't go to the right churches, if they don't know the right people, they don't get well paying jobs, they don't get entree into stable employment. And in addition to that, it creates administrative burden for folks that are trying to access benefits. So people are gonna have more stigmatizing interactions with workers, given the social divide. If you know that you are at the bottom of the social order and your case worker, your Medicaid or your SNAP case worker has gotten this elite position at this agency, you're probably gonna experience some stigma and you're probably gonna be disempowered in that interaction.

And in addition, it creates high compliance costs, which we define in public administration as having to resubmit documents and fill out paperwork over and over and over again. I've had countless interviews with folks that tell me how on top of their paperwork they have to be and how they have to preemptively get on their workers about submitting their paperwork on time because of workers' mistakes and poor case management. If you got your job because of who you know or a primarily white elite county board of commissioners, won't hire additional workers, won't raise taxes to enhance the DSS workforce. You're probably gonna have some burden, some things that happen to folks that are trying to access benefits. And then discontinuity in services. So delayed benefits if people receive their benefits at all, and ultimately greater hardship for those that are trying to access federal programs.

So here's the social order. Again, we have the white landed elite that are controlling job opportunities in the community while simultaneously controlling DSS resources through their power in county level government, DSS serves to maintain the social order by employing the white middle class and funneling money into the community that supports low wage employment for the black working class, rural poor whites and rural African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. And then we have on top of that, this whole dynamic creating tenuous access to public assistance, right? Because DSS employment is continued upon who you know, economic opportunities in these communities are dependent upon who you know, this disadvantages those that are trying to access the safety net.

Now I'm coming to the close of my talk. I'm just gonna reiterate some key takeaways. I know I talked very fast, but I'm looking forward to the Q&A.

So landed elites are shaping social policy implementation again, through controlling job opportunities. They're influencing the demand of public assistance. They're shaping demand for DSS employment. They're controlling DSS by determining the DSS budget and the work conditions for bureaucrats. So DSS directors are often in a tug of war with the county manager and with the county board of commissioners on their needs, and trying to figure out ways to enhance their capacity to deliver services. When you have a white elite that's controlling the county board of commissioners and controlling county level power, and they're unwilling to budge, are unwilling to raise taxes. It creates poor working conditions for bureaucrats. DSS ends up maintaining social order by providing employment opportunities to the middle and bottom strata when elites are reluctant to do so, it's a necessary evil. They do so by infusing revenue into local economy that supports the retail and service industry.

So what does this mean theoretically? Change the view. Oh, goodness. I need to change the view. What does this mean theoretically? It opens up the black box of local political ideology. So if you're a student of a welfare reform and you're a student of social policy, you've probably seen, you've seen some folks argue for local variation as a way to innovate and create new things and new ideas, and new ways of delivering high quality services. But you probably also heard the narratives about the downside of devolution and creating these racial disparities. And one of the variables that people point to is local political ideology and local political culture is undermining the capacity for the welfare state to serve the vulnerable. So this is used to explain variation of welfare spending denials in TANF sanctioning patterns.

But I open up the black box by showing community level processes that constitute this local political culture. So we no longer have this sort of fuzzy, local political ideology, or what's happening in these communities. I'm really sort of demonstrating the rich sort of process, I'm identifying the histories, the families and the interests that constitute local political culture. And that might be driving this variation we see across states and in the case of North Carolina across counties, and then I'm also demonstrating how we could disrupt white elite control over safety net programs. So I've been doing this work as I mentioned for seven years, and I've been doing a lot of this in partnership with North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. And one of the things that I always say, and they don't have control over it, 'cause the general assembly does decide this centralized decentralized model. But one of the things I always say is if you wanna improve performance, you need to centralize administrative funds. If you want to reduce varied performance across counties, you need to centralize administrative funds. In addition to white elite, trying to control how much spending happens in these counties, you do have less resourced counties that cannot afford to fund a robust high quality welfare state. So if you want to reduce inequities, you should centralize and shift the cost sharing away from the counties to the state and that centralizing or have the federal government rethink the cost sharing agreement. Is there a way that cost sharing could be indexed on state's capacity, given that we have so much evidence now that's demonstrating the negative impacts of federalism in social policy delivery. So in addition to shifting cost sharing and shifting administrative funds to the state or the federal level, we should also centralize discretion over DSS salaries and qualifications. So I'm basically saying let's take back control from counties and states, which some people may not like depending on where you sit. But I do think that that's worth considering if we're really serious about redressing inequities in poverty and hardship,

What are my next steps? So we have been in a pandemic for going on two, is it two and a half years, two years. And I was disrupted as I was sort of finishing up some of these interviews and these observations and the state had shifted its priorities to understanding how COVID, COVID related policy changes in these big federal programs were being experienced by folks and how well they're being delivered in these counties. So I shifted focus a bit to answer those questions. And I'm happy to talk about that work in the Q&A, but I right now am finishing some of these interviews. So I'm doing interviews with county commissioners and community leaders to round out the data collection. And I'm really trying to deepen the analysis. So I have this framework, but I'm trying to kick around alternative explanations that might be driving some of the processes that I observe. And I'm really looking forward to talking with y'all to get a sense of what that might be and maybe some other avenues to explore that might strengthen or add nuance to the framework. And then I'm triangulating perspectives with historical documents and administrative data. So looking at family letters, going back and looking at court records, looking through or calling administrative data from the state, trying to connect these features, these community features operationalizing these community features and connecting that with the federal performance outcomes related to timeliness and error. So that's where I am right now in my immediate next steps. And I'm gonna conclude there, thank you so much for the opportunity to share this work. And I look forward to your feedback.

Dean Linda Burton: Thank you. Well, everyone, please join me again in thanking Carolyn for a great presentation and just exquisite answers to tough questions. Thank you so much, Carolyn. So let's give her another round of applause. Thank you so very, very much.

Dr. Carolyn Barnes: Thank you for having me. Bye.

- Hope you all have a great day.