Policies do not exist in a vacuum, and in turn they influence how the people they effect interact with politics and society. In new research, Anna Kopec uses homelessness policies in Toronto, Canada, and Melbourne, Australia, to examine how people’s interactions with policies can influence their political inclusion and engagement. She finds that more integrated homelessness services – such as in Melbourne – not only contribute to policy success, they can also increase the likelihood that users will participate politically.

For many of us, a change in our housing situation requires only a few unfortunate or unforeseen circumstances, such as a change in employment or marital status. Now, consider how you might feel if you go to apply for a housing benefit and you learn about all the documents you need, or how the meager sum of a social assistance program might influence how you view the government or even the material resources you might have to participate, be it voting or contributing to campaigns. What if the process is strenuous and yet it is simplified with a very helpful frontline worker? Now consider what it might feel like if you interact – like many of us – with multiple policies at once. How might the negative experience applying for the housing benefit interact with a positive experience accessing a medical doctor? My research considers such complex effects in a growing social phenomenon: homelessness.

When we interact with a policy, it can influence our political engagement, and in homelessness we see multiple policies interacting at once. We know from studies that homelessness is often a result of multiple system failures. And yet, we also know that many policies manage homelessness and place responsibility on individuals. Homelessness requires and involves multiple actors and policy areas, but we know little about how people’s interactions with policies might influence how they take part in politics. By using interviews – in part, because individuals experiencing homelessness are often excluded from large scale surveys – in Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, Canada, I wanted to understand how experiences with policies can influence where and how individuals experiencing homelessness participate.

I find that policy design matters, the characteristics that make up policies send messages and allocate resources that interact with one another and those of other policies to influence not only if individuals participate but also how and where they do so. This is significant for democratic considerations and policy effectiveness: policies can be designed in ways that increase the political engagement of marginalized groups.

Policy feedback and homelessness

Policy feedback theory (PFT) is a policy process theory that outlines the effects policies might have on meanings of citizenship and therefore political participation (just one thread of PFT), which can then influence future policies (see Figure 1). Studies have considered the effects of interacting with the criminal justice system, social security, different forms of social assistance, etc. Some have spoken to how specific policy characteristics – say if they are universal or their generosity or the experiences associated with implementation – have effects. And yet, studies don’t often consider how these characteristics might interact within and between policies.

Figure 1 – How policy feedback theory works

It might not be, for example, all aspects of a policy that cause disengagement. Using existing literature, I considered how seven characteristics interact in homelessness to influence participation. These characteristics were: how benefits are distributed (universal or means-tested), how generous they are, people’s eligibility to receive them in terms of the documentation required, their visibility, how they are delivered (and any barriers to access), and their level of integration with other services.

My study included 118 interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness (61), service providers (41), and policymakers (16) in Melbourne and Toronto. I asked participants about policy processes as well as how individuals experiencing homelessness participate politically. Although homelessness includes many policy areas, I focused on housing, health, and social assistance.

Melbourne and Toronto

Melbourne and Toronto are similar in their policy development as cities within federal systems that experience significant homelessness. Where they differ is in the visibility, delivery, and integration of their housing, social assistance, and health policies. Policy analysis and interview data pointed to these differences. There are more access points in Melbourne for emergency housing (see for example NWHN) and emergency housing is more individual-style units rather than the north American shelter system. Social assistance programs are also similar in both, and yet in Melbourne there are Community Engagement Officers that travel to services to offer support. Health services in Melbourne can also be found within services at times, or within clinics targeted towards the population.

These differences matter. Consider the experiences of an interview participant, Cody, who spoke to the benefits of meeting a social assistance outreach worker at their emergency housing: “you could see them at a location you feel better…”, compared to Carl in Toronto who had to go to the social assistance office: ““it’s really humiliating that you’re forced to justify your existence […] often times you’re gunna find yourself trying to make an impression, trying to plead to somebody through bulletproof glass right, and a tiny little hole and neither one of you can hear the other, so yeah so like ‘the other’…”.

Policy effects on participation           

Although in both cities most participants voted in the respective 2019 federal elections (56 percent in Melbourne and 64 percent in Toronto), many faced barriers to voting including the visibility of electoral processes. Most of those I spoke with, however, talked about how they participated in other ways to bring about change and more participated in ways beyond voting. Respondents spoke to engaging with their peers, organizations, the broader public, and with governments to bring about change (see Table 1). And yet, there were differences in where and how they participated in each city.

Table 1 – Participation according to venues

In Melbourne, there was much more participation within organizations (by more than 20 percent). And within these organizations, this happened more so in integrated services. This signals that organizations with integrated services may engage more with their service users – with more opportunities to engage in ways that might influence services. Integration, then, matters not only for policy success but also for effects on participation. Participants in Melbourne were also more likely to participate in multiple forms (86 percent participating in at least two ways compared to 44 percent in Toronto). The visibility, delivery, and integration of services, then, can counteract some of the negative effects of other characteristics.

How policy design can influence political engagement

This study shows that although both Melbourne and Toronto are part of liberal welfare states with means-tested policies, specific policy design characteristics – and their interactions – influence where and how individuals experiencing homelessness engage politically. The negative effects of less generous and means-tested policies interact with the positive effects of more visible, accessible and integrated characteristics to influence participation. This might tell us that even where policies may seem impossible to change (say around their means-tested distribution or their eligibility requirements), they can be altered in other ways to increase political engagement (say in their integration). More participation from those most affected by policy may lead to the policy change needed for more effective solutions to complex policy problems like homelessness.

• This article is based on the paper, ‘The interactive effects of policies: Insights for policy feedback theory from a qualitative study on homelessness’, in Policy Studies Journal. 
• Featured image: “Shelter Now” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by michael_swan
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.  
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