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On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students' math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

Using data from 113 in-depth interviews with beneficiaries of social welfare programs, I examine the ease of access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); and Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy changes that were enacted in response to COVID-19 were explicitly designed to reduce the administrative burden of program participation. I find that while WIC and Medicaid participants reported easier access to benefits, SNAP saw high demand and bureaucratic constraints that undermined access. SNAP participants encountered difficulties that they attributed to burdensome experiences to administrative exclusion. I show how applicants perceived organizational practices as excluding eligible populations from participation in government programs and undermining policies that were designed to reduce administrative burdens.

AbstractScholars have examined how administrative burden creates barriers to accessing public benefits but have primarily focused on the challenges of claiming benefits. Less is known about the difficulties beneficiaries face when using public benefits, especially voucher-based public assistance programs. I argue that the costs of learning how to redeem benefits can discourage program use and undermine policy goals. To enrich the administrative burden framework, this study draws from a qualitative analysis of 43 participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to develop a new subset of learning costs—redemption costs. I argue that two conditions: limited portability and reliance on third-party agents create redemption costs for beneficiaries. I apply these two conditions to two other voucher-based programs: the Housing Choice Voucher Program and the Child Care Subsidy. Examining redemption costs can help clarify when and where beneficiaries experience burdens, reasons behind discontinuity in program participation, and why public programs fail to meet objectives.

Scholars have focused on administrative burden or the costs of claiming public benefits. Learning, psychological, and compliance costs can discourage program participation and benefit redemption. Using 60 in-depth qualitative interviews with participants of the SNAP and WIC programs, we offer thick descriptions of how beneficiaries experience compliance, learning, and redemption costs—a subset of learning costs regarding how to redeem benefits—amidst COVID-19 policy changes. Although policy changes were poised to reduce compliance costs and ease conditions that create redemption costs in each program, the learning costs of policy changes prevented many program participants from experiencing the benefits of these policy transformations.

AbstractIn recent years, scholars have examined the barriers to accessing public assistance benefits. Research identifies learning, compliance, and psychological costs as deterring program use. Compliance costs reflect the burdens of following program rules, which may entail providing documentation, responding to discretionary demands of bureaucrats, or attending appointments to maintain benefits. Studies identify one element of compliance costs—quarterly appointments—as a barrier to continued WIC participation. This article draws on 44 in‐depth qualitative interviews with participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). We examine how WIC participants perceive the reduction of compliance costs following the implementation of remote appointments in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. WIC participants report satisfaction with remote appointments and a reduction in the compliance costs of accessing and maintaining benefits. We conclude by recommending longer term changes to policy and practices to increase access and continuity in WIC receipt.

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations' role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits' capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is "delivered" through nonprofits may dampen citizens' relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.

Outside imagery, graphic design is largely invisible to the research fields most interested in communication campaigns, seeing negligible research conducted from a design perspective. In an era of participatory culture, social media analytics offer new ways of quantifying audience engagement, but the blurring of the boundaries between producers, consumption and audiences through the phenomenon of 'produsage' offers richer, more contextualised insights into the impact of the designed aspects of campaigns. In examining Berakar Komunikasi's campaign supporting the 2014 and 2019 election bids of Indonesia's President Jokowi Widodo, our paper examines how qualitative social media research offers fine-grained insights into the reception of campaigns. The paper raises questions about the siloed nature of research where this neglects design's relation to cultural and social phenomena, thus underscoring the need for interdisciplinary research that brings an integrated framework of concepts and approaches to knowledge production where design is concerned.