Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram have assembled 11 essays by scholars who examine how Americans' understandings of social groups shape both the process and substantive outcomes of policymaking. Explaining how such meanings are made and what they imply proves to be a challenge for the contributors to this edited volume. Because the central concepts here are rather amorphous—group entitlement and deservingness—much room remains for argument about how much of either quality the target groups enjoy. The stated purpose of the book, “to explain, examine, and criticize the social construction of deservedness and entitlement in public policy,” is useful and ambitious (p. 2). Though rich in descriptive content on topics such as Revolutionary War pensions, policies toward Japanese-Americans, housing discrimination law, welfare, and microenterprise development, most of the essays raise many more questions than they answer regarding how socially constructed meanings come to be, how they matter for policy development, and the conditions under which such understandings significantly matter. Examining how public policies enhance or hinder the development of full citizenship is the central question running through these thought-provoking chapters.

The editors' earlier work (Policy Design for Democracy, 1997) on the social construction of target groups provides a common starting point for the authors of this collection. There, Schneider and Ingram presented an analytical framework incorporating the insight that different groups receive different treatment under various public policies based on broadly held understandings of the social worth of groups. This different treatment serves as both an endogenous and exogenous variable. It not only signifies the imputed relative worth of target groups but also contributes to group members' sense of self. Hence, as Joe Soss's chapter relates, welfare recipients develop a lower sense of political efficacy apparently as a result of being on welfare. The collection includes numerous interesting accounts of groups' difficulties as they labor under unequal treatment at the hands of federal policies.

Because the contributing authors explicitly link their essays to the editors' theoretical approach, the chapters cohere more tightly than those in some other edited volumes. Most of the authors structure their narratives around the editors' typology of social groups: advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants. While remaining somewhat unclear, this categorization may offer some intuitive appeal.

Most of the accounts here involve what are called “degenerative” policies (p. 11). These involve policymakers creating negative images of disfavored groups and, in turn, creating policies that undermine the citizenship claims that members of those groups might make. This dynamic weakens not only the members of the target group but also democracy itself. The claim, stated this way, is certainly provocative and provides much grist for those concerned about social and economic inequality, but it leaves substantially unanswered the question of elite versus mass moral agency. Do presidents and Congress members substantially determine who will be considered a “welfare queen” or some other undeserving type, as discussed in Dionne Bensonsmith's chapter (p. 243), or is elite use of epithets little more than a reflection of extant popular sentiment? While Deserving and Entitled is not intended to offer a close examination of the autonomy of mass opinion, the clear implication here is that elite agency and rhetoric typically play leading roles. The editors close their introductory chapter by writing, in part, that “the larger message of this book [is] that social constructions are manipulated to build support for the state and to continue the prevailing social structure” (p. 33). In light of what political scientists know about opportunistic political pandering, this story line seems incomplete.

Despite these shortcomings, several of the essays offer well-crafted narratives of policy areas that are likely of interest to a broad range of students of American public policy. Illustrative of the collection's descriptive thickness but somewhat underdeveloped theoretical approach are chapters on Revolutionary War pensions and twentieth-century federal crime legislation. Laura Jensen's writing on Revolutionary War veterans provides an interesting account of how Congress provided pensions long before the Civil War pensions chronicled in Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992). The congressional debate over those early pensions turned on arguments about gratitude, fiscal ability, and impulses to provide for individuals (usually officers, but not always enlisted men) who served under arms. This debate certainly lent itself to rhetorical gamesmanship, as veterans were portrayed though numerous heroic tropes. It remains somewhat uncertain why the timing of Congress's generosity ebbed and flowed as it did, though perhaps the best explanation involved federal fiscal capacity and the number of surviving veterans at any given time.

Sean Nicholson-Crotty and Kenneth Meier's chapter on anticrime legislation examines the 1909 ban on smoking opium, an essentially anti-Chinese prohibition, and the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which critics labeled as a solution in search of a problem and one that disproportionately targeted racial minorities. The authors frankly acknowledge the complexity of variables that created these policies, and they articulate conditions under which policy entrepreneurs can advance innovation. Briefly, the presence of value-laden stereotypes attached to an identifiable target group, an activist moral entrepreneur, and the likelihood of political profit attached to successful legislation make such policy changes more likely. They find these three factors operative in both their cases, though one is left to wonder if more varied case selection might produce different results.

Joe Soss's concluding chapter accomplishes two objectives. It surveys recent changes in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, and it critiques the editors' target social group theory. Soss executes well on both counts. First, the narrative argues that increasingly paternalistic approaches to welfare provision undermine citizenship rather than advancing it. Of course, this stands in contrast to the argument offered by conservatives, such as Larry Mead, that imposing reciprocal obligations on welfare recipients actually makes them better citizens (see Mead's The New Paternalism, 1997, and Beyond Entitlement, 1986). Soss offers interesting data on the ill effects of welfare receivership on one's sense of political efficacy. This is an intriguing account.

Soss concludes his essay with a seven-point critique of target group theory in an effort to challenge its thin spots and to suggest ways to bolster its promising aspects. An especially salient comment in his essay with which this reviewer heartily agrees is the need for target group theory to specify expectations as to how and why political institutions might act and react in the political environment. Surely these contextually rich accounts provide fertile ground for hypothesis generation and testing. More of that would seem in order.