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Many commentators accuse government of being far too generous towards the poor, while others bemoan the lack of support for those in poverty. Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner have looked at how media commentary and government policy on poverty have changed over the past fifty years. They find that while the government and media had a sympathetic focus on poverty in the 1960s, by the mid-1970s this had shifted to a discourse around social wrongs, dependency and waste. This focus on dependency is now the dominant narrative, meaning that we are now no more generous towards the poor than we were more than 50 years ago, before the War on Poverty.

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.

Policy decisions are greatly affected by the way issues are understood collectively by policy-makers and the public. Naturally, advocates attempt to affect these dynamics by drawing attention to one dimension or another. Lobbyists outside government, such as political leaders and civil servants within governing institutions, try to spin or frame the issues on which they work. Research on framing is difficult, however, because of a methodological complication: no individual actor single-handedly determines how issues are defined collectively. The collective dynamics of agenda-setting and framing are subject to strong competitive forces, maintaining a stable equilibrium at most times, but also to threshold effects that can occasionally lead to rapid shifts in issue definitions. Research strategies used to study one face of framing (at the individual level) are ill suited to study the second face of framing (aggregate shifts in collective issue definitions). We discuss the two faces of framing as they relate to recent literature on policy-making in the European Union and we suggest some avenues for future research.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I. "Seek and Ye Shall Find" -- Chapter 1. Search, Information, and Policy Agendas -- Chapter 2. Organizing for Expertise or Organizing for Complexity? -- Chapter 3. Information, Search, and Government -- Part II. Information and the Growth of Government -- Chapter 4. The Rise and Decline of Institutional Information Processing in the Executive and Legislative Branches -- Chapter 5. From Clarity to Complexity in Congress -- Chapter 6. The Search for Information and the Great New-Issue Expansion -- Chapter 7. The Thickening and Broadening of Government -- Chapter 8. Rounding Up the Usual Political Suspects -- Part III. The Implications of Information in Government -- Chapter 9. Organizing Information and the Transformation of U.S. Policy Making -- Chapter 10. Organizing Complexity -- Appendices -- References -- Index.