{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02954431647471207, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009013520280420632, 'mean_word_length': 4.893805309734513, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics. By Teles Steven M.. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. 230p. $29.95.

Steven Teles is distressed with the current state of welfare policy and politics in the United States. His analysis is the product of a self-acknowledged liberal ideological stance, albeit one tempered by the influence of Martha Derthick, Lawrence Mead, and Aaron Wildavsky, among others. This is not a dispassionate policy study; it conveys the author's strong beliefs in the necessity of redistribution and his "disgust with the character of the . . . welfare system and . . . the political system" (p. 167). Teles' argument is clearly presented and straightforward: The majority of Americans have for some time preferred a work-based welfare system over the present system, which provides disincentives and even exacts penalties for working, yet the AFDC system has resisted all meaningful attempts to be reconstructed to match public demands. Successful social policy relies on the presence of a broad consensus among the public. AFDC has long been a focus of "dissensus," which began to rise in the late 1930s when the original ADC program first was divided among the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor, the latter group constituted principally of women who bore children out of wedlock or who were deserted. This dissensus has been solidified and institutionalized by the positions taken by contending conservative and liberal elites whose visions of appropriate paths for welfare policy are often defined rigidly and reflect neither public opinion nor the public interest. In Teles' view, welfare politics have been driven by the views of contesting elites rather than by close reading of public opinion. Elite dissensus, he argues, led to gridlock in Congress, the use of the courts to harden the differences between welfare rights supporters and opponents, and, ultimately, to the institutionalization of the irrational system of welfare that currently is in place.