The Socio-political Perspective of Disability and the Political Representation of People with Disabilities in the U.S.
Disability studies have induced significant debates in a wide range of fields of social science, such as economics, sociology, and phycology. Much of these debates has resulted from a definitional shift of disability, from a medical orientation, which focuses on functional impairments, and an economic approach, which stresses vocational limitations, to a socio-political perspective, which views disability as an interaction between the individual and the environment (Goering 1). The socio-political perspective stresses that the environment is formulated by the public policy that reflects social attitudes and values towards people with disabilities. As Saad Nagi, a social scientist who developed this conceptual framework argued in 1965, disability is “a form of inability or limitation in performing roles and tasks expected of an individual within a social environment” (Nagi 3). Although the socio-political approach of disability studies has been long recognized by the academic disciplines and prevailed in the “battle of defining disability,” however, little attention has been devoted to this subject by political scientists. This blog will briefly examine and analyze the socio-political perspective of disability and propose solutions to improve the political representation of people with disabilities in the U.S.
The socio-political model of disability shifts the emphasis away from evaluating the disability per se. Instead, it perceives disability as a state of the body that is non-standard, however neutral to the people with disabilities (Goering 2). For example, people who are blind from birth, often understand their blindness as a neutral way of being, it is nothing less than a description of the physical body, rather than as a deficit. As Deborah Kent, a famous writer who writes about her own disability reports: “…from my point of view, I wasn’t like a normal child — I was normal. From the beginning, I learned to deal with the world as a blind person. I premised my life on the conviction that blindness was a neutral characteristic” (Kent et al. 57). To people with disabilities, when their disabilities are deemed neutral in their own eyes, accordingly, what caused their handicaps in integrating into society lies on the failure of a social environment to adjust to the needs of them. According to Nagi, these handicaps are resulted from “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities” (Nagi 25). By examining disability as a product of social environment, the socio-political model shifts emphasis away from the individual with disabilities to the broader social, cultural, economic, and political environment.
Standing in stark contrast to the medical definition and economic approach of disability, which examine the physical and vocational limitations of people with disabilities, the socio-political model of disability stresses that social values, instead of physical limitations or economic productivity, are what fundamentally make the people with disabilities as an inferior group of people. This set of moral principles has the roots in the notions of ableism and normalcy, it is resulted from other people’s expectations based on the presumptions about the inability to perform, such as quality of life and ability to work. According to the socio-political model, social values have largely contributed to how the physical structures and institutional norms are made and sustained, gave rise to the attitudinal obstacles faced by people with disabilities, and accordingly, prevented them from acquiring equal rights as members of a political community (Goering 2). Disability is thus, a form of social oppression generated by ableism, disablism, and exclusion from social life.
With the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) enacted in 1990, increasing emphasis on protecting and promoting the legal rights of people with disabilities has led to a growing recognition that disabled people are facing social discrimination just like their ethnic or racial counterparts. In the U.S., disabled people not only constitute the majority portion of welfare recipients but also have one of the highest unemployment rates. People with disabilities have confronted handicaps in architecture, transportation, and public accommodations, which have excluded them from common social, economic, and political activities, facing harsher treatments than then-racial segregationist policies. Moreover, most disabled children are assigned to “special” or separate schools, and many of them are excluded from educational opportunities (Goering 2).
Even with the growing recognition of people with disabilities as a social and political minority, however, in the U.S., there are still ample handicaps in place that prevent people with disabilities from representing themselves in the representative political system. According to a Pew Research Center report, people with disabilities, just like their abled counterpart, care about who wins at elections, however, those with disabilities are less likely to turn out to vote on Election Day as they face a number of obstacles in voting (“A Political Profile of Disabled Americans”). In the 2014 midterm election, only 58% of disabled Americans voted, noting that the rate for those who do not have a disability is 63% (“A Political Profile of Disabled Americans”). In addition to being less likely to vote, Americans with disabilities who do vote face handicaps when voting in person. On Election Day 2014, 30% of people with disabilities indicated that their disability is what “made it too difficult to vote” (“A Political Profile of Disabled Americans”).
To improve the representation of people with disabilities, it is essential to create accessible voting, such as disseminating easy-to-read voting instructions or improving remote voting for people with disabilities. According to the Pew Research survey, the most common impediments to voting reported by voters with disabilities were difficulty in reading or seeing the ballot and understanding how to vote or use voting equipment (“A Political Profile of Disabled Americans”). As for disabled politicians, the political parties should provide more funding in order to make the campaigns of these politicians more accessible, noting that disabled politicians have a higher expense in sustaining their campaigns, such as hiring sign interpreter, more personal assistants, medical workers, and accommodating their needs in transportation. Moreover, to secure and further the political representation of people with disabilities, the lawmakers should establish disability quotas, in practice, just like the gender quotas, it can be manifested as reserved seats, candidate quotas, or political party quotas.
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in attracting the “disability vote” in both congressional and presidential elections. In the recent political campaigns, both parties’ candidates had released policy guidelines on addressing issues of disability, hired outreach coordinators to the disabled groups, and tailored their campaign messages to appeal to the disability community at large (Dénes et al. 2). However, when both conservatives and liberals are aiming to attract the support of the disability constituency, which consists of 17 percent of the electorate (“A Political Profile of Disabled Americans”), as suggested in this blog, the perspective of the disability community itself is oftentimes absent.
Works Cited
Dénes, Dóra, et al. “Disabled Representation in Politics: Why Do We Still Need to Talk About It?” 4Liberty.Eu, 10 July 2019, 4liberty.eu/disabled-representation-in-politics/.
Goering, Sara. “Rethinking disability: the social model of disability and chronic disease.” Current reviews in musculoskeletal medicine vol. 8,2 (2015): 134–8. doi:10.1007/s12178–015–9273-z.
Igielnik, Ruth. “A Political Profile of Disabled Americans.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 22 Sept. 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/22/a-political-profile-of-disabled-americans/.
Kent, Deborah, et al. Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights. Georgetown Univ. Press, 2000.
Nagi SZ. Some conceptual issues in disability and rehabilitation. Sociology and rehabilitation. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association; 1965.
