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Abstract
This dissertation combines theoretical, historical, and empirical approaches to explore the implications of increasing debt and bankruptcy filings for American citizenship. Being a debtor was historically punished and retains some level of stigma even today, marking debtors—and especially bankrupts—as civic failures. Yet accruing personal debt is also implicitly required to be a good citizen in the United States, where striving for the American dream often requires taking on debt through mortgages, car loans, and consumer credit. In my dissertation I explore this ambivalent relationship between debt and American citizenship through an examination of bankruptcy filing—the primary site where the federal government offers relief to debtors. I employ qualitative and quantitative methods, including analysis of publicly available data and my own original survey of bankruptcy officials, to examine the ways in which bankruptcy filing has come to function as a kind of welfare program, and consider how well it serves this function. I find that bankruptcy is limited in its ability to serve as a social insurance program because it advances a highly individualized and stigmatized solution to financial distress, a pattern strengthened by recent bankruptcy reforms which have made bankruptcy more punitive and harder to access. I conclude that the reliance on personal debt and bankruptcy to cover social risks is damaging to American citizenship because it individualizes and depoliticizes what, in a robust welfare state, could be seen as a broader social project of risk protection.
