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This book is a concise, accessible guide to help social workers understand how politics and policy making really work-and what they can do to help their clients and their communities. It offers informed, practical grounding in the mechanics of policy making and the tools that activists and outsiders can use to take on an entrenched system.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The U.S. Constitution Is Undemocratic
2. Our Representative Institutions Are Not Representative
3. We’re Terrible at Conducting Elections
4. We Are Exceptional—but Not in a Good Way
5. Most of Us Will Be Poor and on Welfare
6. Everything Is Political
7. Conservatism Is Not Conservative and Some of Us Are More Polarized Than Others
8. Cruel and Unjust Policies Serve a Purpose for Someone
9. Where You Can Go Depends on Where You’ve Been
10. Look at What’s Not Happening
11. People Learn Lessons About Their Value from Their Interactions with Government Agencies
12. The People Who Benefit Most from Government Are Most Likely to Claim They Don’t Benefit at All
13. People Like Lice and Cockroaches Better Than Congress
14. The Thing They Say About Making Sausage Is True
15. Presidents Are Weak and Command Too Much of Our Attention
16. It Really Is the Economy, Stupid
17. Judges Are Players, Not Umpires
18. People Aren’t Dumb but They Sure Are Ignorant
19. There Is No Public
20. There Is No View from Nowhere
21. You Will Not Change Anyone’s Mind
22. Social Work Is Conservative
23. Throw Sand in the Gears of Everything
Conclusion: We Can Do Better. There Are Solutions.
References
Index
About the author
Stephen Pimpare is a professor in the MPP program and a Faculty Fellow of the Carsey School of Public Policy at University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages (New Press, 2004); A People’s History of Poverty in the United States (New Press, 2008, winner of Michael Harrington Book Award at APSA); and Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). He has previously taught at Columbia School of Social Work, Hunter’s Silberman School of Social Work, and NYU’s Silver School of Social Work, among others.
Summary
The social work profession calls on its members to strive for social justice. It asks aspiring and practicing social workers to advocate for political change and take part in political action on behalf of marginalized people and groups. Yet this macro goal is often left on the back burner as the day-to-day struggles of working directly with clients take precedence. And while most social workers have firsthand knowledge of how public policy neglects or outright harms society’s most vulnerable, too few have training in the political processes that created these policies.
This book is a concise, accessible guide to help social workers understand how politics and policy making really work—and what they can do to help their clients and their communities. Helping readers develop sustainable strategies at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, this book is a hands-on manual to contemporary American politics, showing social workers and social work students how to engage in effective activism. Stephen Pimpare, a political scientist with extensive experience as a social work practitioner and instructor, offers informed, practical grounding in the mechanics of policy making and the tools that activists and outsiders can use to take on an entrenched system. He distills key research and insights from political science and related disciplines into a practical resource for social work students, instructors, and practitioners looking to deepen their policy knowledge and capacity to achieve change.
Additional text
Politics for Social Workers provides a uniquely thorough explanation and in-depth analysis of the structure and functioning of our political system. Pimpare brings this analysis to bear on policies and political structures that create the inequities and marginalization that social workers seek to alleviate. The book will grant social work students a more critically informed perspective from which to approach their ethical obligations to social justice.
