What is Social Policy?

Some people define social policy rather narrowly, to include mainly welfare, public health insurance, and social security programs. In the United States, this definition includes transfer programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, which was formerly known as food stamps), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, which is sometimes referred to as welfare), school lunch and breakfast programs, Supplemental Security Insurance, and unemployment insurance; it also sometimes includes tax programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit. Others define social policy more broadly to include not only all of these transfer and tax programs, but also policies addressing other social issues such as abortion, gun regulation, immigration, minimum wage, marijuana regulation, euthanasia, race, gender, and sexual orientation. We generally adopt this broader definition, although we do exclude environmental issues that others might include, because we consider environmental policy to be a separate policy domain and not a subdomain of social policy.