Centering Social and Political Spaces: Middle (class) Discourses and Social Policy Design

In welfare state research it has long been recognized that the middle class and the systems of social security constitute an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, as the redistributive measures of welfare states are “not only for the poor” (Goodin and Le Grand), it is also the middle class that benefits from social security systems and the opportunities for individual advancements they provide. On the other hand, the middle class is considered to be the main contributor to the financing of social provisions, which puts the welfare state under suspicion of excessively burdening the core of society. The middle class is therefore a particularly important target group to secure the functioning of social policies and the long-term stability of welfare institutions. Accordingly, in many (Western) welfare states, the status of the middle class regularly serves as an indicator for the condition of politics and society as a whole. At the same time, the middle class can be seen as a complex and ambiguous category with a variety of potential meanings. Therefore, investigating the nexus between the social construction of target groups and policy design poses two conceptual challenges. Firstly, references to “the middle class” do not denominate a group with clear rules of membership, which would seem to be the precondition to reduce the analysis of its construction to the question of positive or negative evaluation (as Schneider and Ingram propose). Rather, the very boundaries of “the middle class” are highly contingent and, in the sense of an “empty signifier”, open to a wide range of definitions of what the middle of society is, needs and deserves. Secondly, talk of “the middle class” not only refers to a group of individuals but is regularly entangled with the idea of “a middle ground” in politics and society. In an Aristotelian notion, “the middle” functions as an essential ethical compass and, thus, as a landmark for political orientation, with political parties contesting to occupy the “political middle”. Therefore, “the middle (class)” can be expected to serve as both an explicit target group of welfare policies and as a normative point of reference for justifying or criticizing political claims. In our paper we will thus investigate “the middle (class)” not as a given group or space that is simply evaluated differently but as a discursive category which is constantly being reproduced and rearranged in public, political and academic debates. Applying a perspective informed by interpretative approaches to policy analysis, we research how the boundaries and constitutive features of “the middle (class)” are constructed and how these constructions leave their marks in the design and legitimization of social policies in Germany. By building on newspaper articles and (semi-)academic publications, we aim at identifying the discursive practices of “centering” social and political spaces which then function as a major yardstick in political processes, both as an explicit target of welfare policies and as an implicit point of reference for negotiating “appropriate” policy designs.