What Does Addiction Mean in US Policy Debates?

The concept of addiction is threaded throughout US policy debates in unexpected contexts, yet this keyword in American political culture is understudied and undertheorized. A case study of the “welfare addict” demonstrates several facets of the term’s political power—most notably, its capacity to discredit its targets as legitimate democratic actors. Ordinary language analysis of archival and media sources shows that the recurrent theme of recipients allegedly becoming “addicted to welfare” was critical to the consolidation of welfare reform in 1996 because it provided a “color-blind” racial logic of gendered poverty with which conservatives and liberals built distinct yet complementary cases for reform. Drawing upon the term’s symbolic meanings, “welfare addiction” became a leading narrative in the reform era because it displaced public concern about the domestic effects of global economic interdependence, as well as elite anxiety about their own reliance on government subsidies, onto a systematically disempowered target population.