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COMMENT
In "Social Construction of Target Populations," Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram present a provocative argument about an issue of fundamental importance to the study of policy formation and development, the effect of the nature of target populations on policy outcomes. They suggest that the allocation of policy benefits and burdens depends not only on the relative social power of groups in society but also on the "social construction" of the groups that policies are intended to affect. Notions of identity have transformed contemporary political theory, and the authors deserve great credit for their attempts to apply ideas about group identity to the study of public policy and to forge a link between the critical and positive traditions in social science. Their work is particularly welcome at a moment when issues of racial, gender, and ethnic identity are at the center of vigorous debate in the political and academic worlds and when the tension between rampant individualism and group solidarity has never been greater (Walzer 1992).
But Schneider and Ingram's proposed approach to this important question lacks a clear causal argument. Its central flaw is the conceptual imprecision of the idea of "social construction," which is one of the pillars of their analysis. The very use of the language of "social construction" begs important questions about the origins and political meaning of group identities. Understanding the importance of the nature of target populations for policy and politics requires an account of where group identities come from, how they change, and how social and political institutions adjudicate among contending definitions of group identity in making public policy. Schneider and Ingram offer none of these.
TARGET POPULATIONS AND POLICYMAKING
The first part of Schneider and Ingram's article sketches a basic claim about the nature of target populations and their impact on policy outcomes. Traditional theories of policymaking account for the allocation of burdens and benefits among social groups on the basis of various measures of social and political power. To this dimension Schneider and Ingram add a second, the social construction of groups. By "social construction," they mean the recognition (by some unspecified subject) that certain shared characteristics define a discrete social group and the attribution to these shared characteristics (again by an unspecified subject) of positive...