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Framing Social Policy through Jobs and Investment: An Analysis of the Biden Administration's Socioeconomic Policy Discourse

  • Analyses & Alternatives
  • Abbr : A&A
  • 2026, 10(2), pp.43~82
  • DOI : 10.22931/aanda.2026.10.2.002
  • Publisher : Korea Consensus Institute
  • Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
  • Received : May 22, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Seol A Jang 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines how the Biden administration articulated its social policy agenda within official discourse, rather than how that agenda fared as legislation. Existing scholarship reads the administration's domestic program as an ambitious welfare-state expansion later checked by retrenchment, yet leaves underexamined how social provisions were defined, framed, and linked to broader policy goals in the first place. Because a policy's meaning depends on the problem it is presented as addressing and the policy language through which it is explained, this study asks with which policy languages the administration associated its social agenda, and how those linkages structured its official discourse. Drawing on official White House texts published between January 2021 and January 2025, the analysis combines keyword frequency, N-gram, and sentence- and category-level co-occurrence analysis. Social policy vocabulary retained a visible presence throughout the term, yet ‘jobs’ and ‘investment’ operated as the central terms linking otherwise distinct agendas. At the level of four analytical categories, welfare/protection (the traditional safety-net language of income support, health, and housing) and social investment (education, training, and human-capital formation) repeatedly co-occurred with industrial policy. Fiscal responsibility, by contrast, attached chiefly to these two social categories rather than to industrial policy. These patterns indicate that social policy was not articulated primarily through the traditional welfare idiom of social rights, decommodification, and protection against social risk. Instead, it was repeatedly situated within the logics of labor-market participation, productive capacity, cost reduction, and fiscal soundness. The study conceptualizes this configuration as theeconomization of social policy.

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