Public Policy and Relationships

This entry describes the complex and intersecting connections between public policy and interpersonal relationships. The need for public policies that foster strong relationships, coupled with better capacity building in community settings, is stressed.

When leaders of social movements assert that “the personal is political,” they intend to underscore how individuals' experiences of oppression in the workplace, at home, and elsewhere are rarely isolated events. Seemingly disparate experiences often stem from common systemic injustices, and collective opposition to those injustices can become a challenging force against them. This is no less true today than in earlier periods, as some of the most oppressed groups, such as immigrant families, children in poverty, and survivors of wars and natural disasters, struggle to find ways to organize a unified voice.

As a corollary to this rallying cry, it is also useful to consider the ways in which the political is personal. Indeed, public policies are often most acutely experienced at the personal level through their influence on relationships. Family relationships are affected by a range of policies, including those that impact the legal rights and economic well-being of families. For example, as tax incentives and related economic policies lead jobs and factories to relocate to less developed countries, unemployment in the abandoned communities can strain workplace relationships and family harmony and can leave taxpayers struggling to sustain basic municipal services. When schools, after-school programs, and youth service agencies are forced to “tighten their belts” as a result of local or national [Page 1313]economic decline, they find themselves stretching their limited resources in ways that diminish the fidelity of interventions and imperil the closeness and duration relationships. At the same time, “bottom line” federal school policies that reward a narrow range of performance goals often have the unintended consequence of reducing the quality and intensity of relationships in those settings. Just as legislators need to recognize and take into account the implications of policies on supportive relationships, there is an onus on researchers to demonstrate the value of personal rel ation ships and the ways in which they are affected by policies. There are countless issues (e.g., domestic violence, same-sex unions, classroom practices, foster care, incarceration, women's reproductive rights, and divorce) that exemplify this connection, three of which are discussed next.