Envisioning Dependency: Changing Media Depictions of Welfare in the 20th Century

Welfare dependency, or the idea that welfare makes the poor "dependent" on the government and incapable of providing for themselves, has dominated discussions about welfare for decades. Our research documents how media depictions of dependency have changed over time. We examine representations of welfare in popular culture by analyzing randomly sampled magazine articles over eight periods from 1929 through 1996. Despite the dominance of dependency depictions, we find that media discourse about welfare also provides significant support for welfare. We analyze how different factors, including racialized and gendered images of welfare recipients, relate to depictions of dependency. We find that concerns about men's dependency have decreased over the twentieth century, while concerns about women's dependency have increased exponentially, in part due to increases in unmarried and teen motherhood. In addition, we find that media representations of recipients as African American minorities are associated with the use of dependency rhetoric.