Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

This paper explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although nonwhites are sanctioned at lower rates than whites overall, nonwhites are sanctioned more compared to whites in each local area. This paradox occurs because nonwhites tend to live in areas with lower sanction rates. Consistent with the literature on race and policy, we find that sanction rates increase as the nonwhite population increases until a threshold is reached where nonwhites gain political power.

The Impact of Organized Interests on Eligibility Determination: The Case of Veterans' Disability Compensation

A bureaucracy has a profound impact on public policy when it determines eligibility for government programs. Organized interest groups can increase the amount of information the target population has about the program, help applicants with their applications, and work to inform policy makers when the process is not working well. By doing these things, interest groups can affect how government programs are implemented. In this paper, we investigate the influence of veterans' interest groups on eligibility determinations in the Veterans' Disability Compensation (VDC) program across the fifty U.S. states to determine whether variations in veterans' organizations can explain why VA programs are implemented differently across the states. We find that the strength of veterans' groups affect demand for, access to, and effectiveness of the Veterans' Disability Compensation program. In states where veterans' groups have greater resources, more veterans file claims, more applications are approved, and, interestingly, the Veterans' Administration makes fewer errors in their eligibility decisions. We find no evidence, however, that the strength of veterans groups explain variation in the number of claims that are appealed, the percent of claims that are pending over 120 days, or the average disability rating given to successful claimants.Includes bibliographical reference

Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

This paper explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although nonwhites are sanctioned at lower rates than whites overall, nonwhites are sanctioned more compared to whites in each local area. This paradox occurs because nonwhites tend to live in areas with lower sanction rates. Consistent with the literature on race and policy, we find that sanction rates increase as the nonwhite population increases until a threshold is reached where nonwhites gain political power

Lipstick and Logarithms: Gender, Institutional Context, and Representative Bureaucracy

According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, passive representation among public employees will lead to active representation in bureaucratic outputs. Existing research demonstrates that the link between passive and active representation exists for race but not for sex. Past research on this topic has not, however, taken into account the contextual environment that affects whether sex will translate into gender and lead to active representation in the bureaucracy. In this paper, we create a framework that specifies the conditions that affect whether passive representation results in active representation for sex and then test this framework using the case of education. We find that passive representation of women in education leads to active representation and that the institutional context affects the extent to which this link between passive and active representation occurs

The Political Roots of Disability Claims: How State Environments and Policies Shape Citizen Demands

By examining a model of welfare demand in the Social Security Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs, the authors test the hypothesis that state environments shape aggregate rates of welfare demand. They find that in addition to citizens' needs for government assistance, the density of civil society organizations, state officials' political perspectives and programs' generosity shape citizen demands on the welfare system. They call for a model of welfare-claiming behavior that accounts for differences across programs and stages of the claiming process