Welfare reform and paternity establishment: A social experiment

From March 1988 through September 1989, a demonstration study was conducted in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, on procedures for expediting paternity establishment. The issue of paternity establishment is central to current concerns about child support. In the 1988 Family Support Act, for example, administrative reforms to expedite paternity establishment are prominently featured. The results of the Cuyahoga demonstration provide early evidence of the likely impact of the 1988 reforms. At the implementation stage, the demonstration points up the complex interorganizational dependencies that are likely to limit the impact of mandated performance standards and associated sanctions directed at state and local child support agencies. As to the impact on paternity establishment outcomes, interventions directed at expediting administrative processes are likely to have a positive effect. However, the results of the demonstration indicate that noncooperative behavior among a significant portion of the client population is likely to seriously limit the effectiveness of expedited processes.     

Welfare,work experience,and economic self‐sufficiency

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare‐to‐work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or low levels of experience. This distinction is important for designing effective welfare policy. In the following paper, we estimate how wages grew with work experience between 1978 and 1992 for a national sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We compare women who never received welfare with both short‐ and long‐term recipients in order to see to what extent the rates of wage growth with work experience differ. We find that they differ very little. We use numerous specification checks to test the robustness of our results and find consistent evidence that the wages of AFDC recipients grew at a rate similar to those of nonrecipients once work experience is taken into account. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

福利与政治——简评卢曼的福利政治观

与传统的结合于基本人权、弱者救助的社会福利倡导观念不同,卢曼更看到了在当代社会中这种简单的福利观念对社会发展带来的负面影响和对社会矛盾的刺激。卢曼认为,社会福利问题的观察和解决需要借助于系统理论。政治、法律、教育、经济都是一个个封闭而自治的系统,相互之间的简单干预都会影响到彼此的正常功能。它们彼此之间的积极性的影响只能通过系统间的结构性耦合来实现。这些观点对我国当前的福利研究和制度设计会带来一定的启发。     

Local Government and Welfare Generosity: Municipality Spending on Social Welfare

Although it is difficult for local governments to give support for social welfare recipients top political priority, there are huge variations in the support recipients actually receive among Norwegian municipalities. However, local governments representing different party ideologies may prefer to support different dimensions of generosity. Some municipalities could have a liberal attitude to eligibility rules but be strict on time limits and the amount of money provided. Others may be generous regarding time limits or amounts received once one is accepted as a welfare client. Data from the mid 1990s indicate the variation in support is related to different generosity dimensions for different party groups. While the total number of clients seems unrelated to politics and basically correlates with local social problems, the duration and amount of support are related to the political composition of the municipality assembly. Devoid of any large variation, both time limits and the amount of support increase in accordance with socialist leanings, and the total budget used for social welfare support also increases with the proportion of women in the municipality assembly.     

Welfare and state centralisation

The expansion of the welfare state is said to have led to the direct involvement of local government in the provision of social services. Increased participation of local government in welfare services would furthermore produce a centralisation of power. In this article, the above sequence of links is investigated in eight West European countries. One observes no strong correlation between the level of welfare provision and the level of state centralisation. But this absence of links results from two strong associations: one positive between welfare effort and local government involvement, and the other negative between the latter and state centralisation.     

Research and Welfare Reform

Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes ignored findings, but the features of research also limited its influence. Most academics did not accept the conservative goals of reform, many of their predictions proved to be incorrect, and research also lacked sufficient policy content to interest government. These features reflect the recent development of the social sciences. For research to have more influence, it must become more catholic about goals and more realistic, and it must offer more governmental content. Especially, inquiry should rely less on the statistical analysis of databases and more on field observation of how poor communities live and programs operate.     

Welfare Receipt and Private Charity

In the wake of welfare reform efforts, alliances between governments and charities, and public preoccupation with “social capital,” it is useful to understand how welfare payments interact with charitable giving. Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data from the first quarter of 1999, this article estimates the impacts on charitable giving by individuals from receipt of welfare payments, as well as income, wealth, and a number of demographic variables. The data analysis suggests that charity is negatively associated with welfare receipt, while wealth, income, and age have positive impacts on giving. These findings have significant implications for public policy and nonprofit management.     

The boundary conditions for regulation: Welfare systems,state traditions,and the varied governance of work safety in Europe

Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Drawing on an extensive international analysis of primary documents, secondary literature, and interviews with regulator, insurance, business, and labor representatives, the article identifies strikingly varied but stable national preferences for: (a) the use of financial versus regulatory instruments and (b) the allocation of regulatory responsibilities between state and nonstate actors. The article presents a novel explanation of that variation as dependent on the relative coherence of interactions between the particular cost‐control logics of welfare provision and wider norms and traditions of state action in each country.