The Politics of Homelessness: Poverty, Policy, and Political Participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do everyday interactions with the welfare state influence political participation? The policies individuals interact with dictate their relationship with the state. Policy designs, therefore, play a vital role in the inclusion of individuals into the welfare state as well as the political system. Policies have effects on how individuals participate politically, through the resources they distribute, the institutional arrangements they govern, and the messages they send regarding the deservingness of target populations (Pierson, 1993; Campbell, 2004; Schneider & Ingram, 1993; Mettler, 2005). How policy designs influence participation, and how different policies integrate to influence political participation and inclusion, requires further attention. An investigation of the relationship between policy and participation from the perspective of a marginalized population allows for a bottom-up examination of the welfare state (Michener, SoRelle & Thurston, 2020). Individuals experiencing homelessness are among the most vulnerable in western states and interact with several state appendages and services. In doing so, they advocate for themselves and others while interacting with multiple policies. In this dissertation, I describe a causal mechanism that connects the inclusivity of policy design and the interaction of multiple policies on the one hand, to political participation on the other. Policy inclusivity and participation are defined inductively. I present empirical evidence from a mixed method comparative study, which includes 118 interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness, service providers, and policymakers in Melbourne and Toronto. Both cities are located in liberal welfare states with means-tested and individualist policies to combat homelessness. Results from a quantitative analysis of national election surveys finds that there are complex relationships between policy, poverty, and participation. Qualitative interviews, therefore, add vital nuance to these quantitative findings and build the mechanism of policy design inclusivity. Even given failing and exclusionary housing, social assistance, and health policies, individuals experiencing homelessness participate and express their desire to bring about change. Investigating how and where individuals participate, as well as the policy designs that encourage or limit that participation, is therefore important to policy success and democratic inclusion. This research contributes to multiple bodies of political science and public policy literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".