Effective child support policy for low‐income families: evidence from street level research

Since 1984, policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to reforming the child support system. Despite this attention, the child support system has often failed to increase the economic security of single‐parent families. This article analyzes findings from recent qualitative studies to explain why the child support system breaks down for so many low‐income families. This research suggests that parents often prefer informal arrangements of support and do not comply with child support regulations they perceive to be unfair, counterproductive, or punitive. It also suggests that there is a mismatch between the premises and goals of child support policy and what low‐income parents desire from the system. This mismatch impedes low‐income parents' willingness and ability to comply with existing policy, even when they wish to do so, and will make reform difficult. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Using the Kaldor‐Hicks tableau format for cost‐benefit analysis and policy evaluation

This note describes the Kaldor‐Hicks (KH) tableau format as a framework for distributional accounting in cost‐benefit analysis and policy evaluation. The KH tableau format can serve as a heuristic aid for teaching microeconomics‐based policy analysis, and offer insight to policy analysts and decisionmakers beyond conventional efficiency analysis. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The long‐term effects on children and adolescents of a policy providing work supports for low‐income parents

New Hope, an employment‐based poverty‐reduction intervention for adults evaluated in a random‐assignment experimental design, had positive impacts on children's achievement and social behavior two and five years after random assignment. The question addressed in this paper was the following: Did the positive effects of New Hope on younger children diminish or even reverse when children reached the challenges of adolescence (eight years after random assignment)? Small positive impacts on school progress, school motivation, positive social behavior, child well‐being, and parent control endured, but impacts on school achievement and problem behavior were no longer evident. The most likely reasons for lasting impacts were that New Hope families were slightly less likely to be poor, and children had spent more time in center‐based child care and structured activities. New Hope represents a model policy that could produce modest improvements in the lives of low‐income adults and children. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effect of child support on welfare exits and re‐entries

Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipient characteristics and state‐level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979‐1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examines whether child support affects the likelihood of leaving and re‐entering welfare. The results indicate that strong child support enforcement is important in helping young mothers exit and stay off welfare. Women with $1000 child support payments in the previous year were 18 percent more likely to exit welfare and 12 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. Compared with women in states that pursued child support least vigorously, women in states that had passed extensive child support enforcement legislation and that spent more money on child support enforcement were 79 percent more likely to exit welfare and about 60 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Regulatory enforcement and compliance: Examining Danish agro‐environmental policy

This study of municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental regulations in Denmark provides an empirical understanding of how enforcement affects compliance. A key contribution is sorting out the relative influence of inspectors' different styles of enforcement and choices made by enforcement agencies. The latter are shown to be more important in bringing about compliance than are inspectors' enforcement styles. Municipal agencies are shown to increase compliance through the use of third parties, more frequent inspection, and setting priorities for inspection of major items. The findings about enforcement styles of inspectors suggest it is necessary to get tough up to a point, but beyond that the threat of coercion can be counterproductive. These findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of overly legalistic enforcement styles, particularly for the Danish culture with its strong emphasis on cooperation and consultation in regulation. But the findings also advise us to be cautious about the use of cooperative styles of enforcement in that we find evidence for capture of the enforcement process by agricultural organizations. This leads to a more nuanced view of enforcement rather than the broad generalizations found in the literature concerning legalism and cooperation. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. <@:>     

Development in sub‐Saharan Africa: cultural influences and managers' decision behaviour

We explore the relevance of national differences in values to development in sub‐Saharan Africa using data from two recent global surveys. The evidence indicates a shared black African culture that emphasizes hierarchy, embeddedness and mastery in contrast to egalitarianism, autonomy and harmony, in keeping with the literature on Africa. Further evidence reveals that African managers stress reliance on formal rules and superiors in reaching decisions, as predicted by their cultural profile. Comparisons with Western European samples indicate that these nations have the opposite cultural profile and that their managers stress self‐reliance and consultation with subordinates. Implications of these contrasts for development in Africa and effective collaboration within donor agencies and multinational firms are discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The transition from traditional to postpositivist policy analysis: A role for Q‐methodology

This paper suggests that a gap exists between policy theorists who are formulating postpositivist models of analysis and the beliefs of practitioners whose labor is guided by the traditional hand of positivism. The tension between postpositivist theory and traditional practice has created a dialectic that contributes to both, but the postpositivist theory is not likely, for reasons discussed in the paper, to spark a revolution in practice. The paper maintains that members of the discipline's intellectual infrastructure can assist the evolution to a policy analysis paradigm that includes elements of postpositivism by introducing incremental changes in practice that reinforce it. For this purpose, one important incremental change is the introduction of Q‐methodology as a common tool for policy analysis. The use of Q‐methodology—a method for the study of subjectivity—would help subvert the assumptions of dominant objectivism that underlie the R‐methods typically learned and used by traditional analysts and could influence analysts to adopt a postpositivist perspective of their work. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Decision process models and the needs of policy-makers: Thoughts on the foreign policy interface

Many political scientists are not at all convinced that empirically verifiable generalizations about political behavior can ever be produced. There are thus many who believe that political scientists can never exert a significant impact upon the public policy-making process. Perhaps one way of narrowing the gap between the researcher and the policy-maker is to examine the public (foreign) policy decision-making process, pinpoint the leverage points within the process where social and political scientists (who engage in foreign policy analysis) might help, and then list the kinds and methods of analysis that would contribute the most to the process. The work of Harold D. Lasswell, James E. Anderson, E. S. Quade, William D. Coplin, and Charles F. Hermann can help us define the (foreign) policy-making process and locate the points at which scientific analysis can help the (foreign) policy-maker. The matching of these leverage points with types and instances of relevant analyses, as well as the methodologies necessary to carry out the analyses results in a matrix of decision tasks and research tasks which may be viewed as an agenda for the conduct of policy relevant research.The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or any other agency of the U.S. Government.     

Paying for grades: Impact of merit‐based financial aid on educational quality

In contrast to education reform efforts that target teachers and schools, merit‐based financial aid for college increases the incentives for high school students and their families to directly affect the quality of education by investing more time and effort in schoolwork. Large‐scale merit‐based aid programs, such as Georgia's HOPE Scholarship, seek to improve education by encouraging students to meet higher standards, in this case by obtaining a 3.0 grade point average in high school and college. Since the HOPE program began in 1993, the number of high school graduates qualifying for the aid has steadily increased to more than 38,000 graduates in the class of 1998, or 59.5 percent of the graduating class. At the same time, the relationship between grades and achievement has remained consistent or, in some cases, improved since HOPE began. In fact, African–American males and females with a 3.1 high school core course grade point average have increased their average Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores by more than 20 points. This indicates that merit‐based aid has improved the quality of K–12 education in Georgia and reduced racial performance disparities by motivating students and their families to commit greater effort to schooling. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Salt,high blood pressure,and performance‐based regulation

Performance‐based regulation is a new approach to public health promotion. The aim of this article is to explain how this idea might be applied to the public health goal of reducing salt consumption as a way of reducing high blood pressure and thereby saving lives. Performance‐based regulation is compared with competing regulatory strategies.