The Politics of Social Welfare Reform in Urban China: Social Welfare Preferences and Reform Policies

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societal groups’ preferences for social welfare has given rise to two lines of cleavage in urban China with respect to social welfare—between state sector and non-state sector employees and between labor market insiders and outsiders. The Chinese authoritarian regime’s political priority—economic growth with social stability—has induced the government to accommodate public social welfare preferences in social welfare policies. Therefore, the three dimensions of Chinese social welfare reform policies since the mid-1980s reflect and respond to the social cleavages derived from societal groups’ different preferences for social welfare.     

A Cross-Level Holistic Model Of Public Service Motivation

ABSTRACT

Using a sample of 63 supervisors and their direct reports (189 immediate subordinates), this study investigated a cross-level model of public service motivation’s (PSM) antecedents in the Chinese public sector. Correlation analyses and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results simultaneously revealed that both subordinates’ proactive personality and supervisors’ servant leadership were related positively to subordinates’ PSM. Additionally, HLM analyses demonstrated that supervisors’ servant leadership and their immediate subordinates’ proactive personality interacted to correlate positively with subordinates’ PSM. Implications of the findings, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Welfare Reform: Revolution or Retrenchment?

This article introduces the two main themes of this specialissue of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, workfare and federalism.At this early stage in the history of the 1996 Welfare ReformAct, these themes must be stated as questions rather than answers,as hypotheses not conclusions. What does the new welfare policyseek to accomplish? What are the effects—intended andunintended—of its limited devolution of power to the states?     

整体型政府:西方公共管理改革的新目标

为改变新公共管理运动带来的愈来愈严重的政府管理碎片化状态,英国等新公共管理改革先锋国家采取了协作和整合的战略,提出建设整体型政府.整体型政府是超越政府层级、部门功能分工的鸿沟,以解决人民的问题、为人民提供整合性服务为核心的政府,是关照全体、预防性、整合性、改变文化、结果取向的政府.     

Prospects for Low-Income Mothers' Economic Survival Under Welfare Reform

This article discusses implications of data on the income andemployment patterns of welfare recipients for the types of programmaticand financial investments that states will need to make forsuccessful welfare reform. Research by the Institute for Women'sPolicy Research found that even before welfare reform, womenworked significant amounts of time and relied heavily on familysupports to survive, when possible. High school education andjob training are important predictors of having welfare andescaping poverty, while work experience alone has relativelylittle effect on leaving welfare. States will be challengedto provide these educational services within the restrictionson job training and education under the new welfare laws. Workingwelfare recipients in the institute's sample spent more thanone third of their income on child care, which speaks to theimportance of increased child-care subsidies for helping womenescape poverty. It is important for states and communities tomonitor the implementation of supportive services, track outcomesfor women who leave welfare, and improve work environments andemployment benefits.     

State Fiscal Responses to Welfare Reform during Recessions: Lessons for the Future

The 1996 welfare reform transformed open-ended matching grants to states to fixed block grants. This article considers whether, given the new regime, states will be able and willing to meet the need for public assistance during recessions. The accumulation of large balances of unspent federal welfare funds helped states weather the first year or so of the current recession without having to cut programs for needy families. While new fiscal rules promoted positive reform during a period of economic prosperity, they may be leaving states and their most vulnerable citizens at serious risk as the economic and fiscal slowdown continues.     

The Impact of Welfare Reform on Medicaid

Welfare reform did not usher in comprehensive Medicaid reform,if "reform" is defined as dismantling the basic framework ordesign of the nations's health-care system for the poor. Instead,it left much of the previous Medicaid system intact. However,welfare reform has contributed to changes in the Medicaid-eligiblepopulations, greater variability and experimentation with stateMedicaid initiatives, and greater sate control over Medicaidprogram decisions. Thus, the welfare-reform movement clarifieda major trend in contemporary American politics—the increasein state discretion and flexibility in social welfare policymaking.The states are now at the center of Medicaid decisionmaking,and they are in a key position to determine the future directionof heath-care assistance for the poor in the United States.     

Welfare Reform, Mississippi Style: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Search for Accountability

Through an examination of the implementation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in the state of Mississippi, we explore the adequacy of traditional two-actor principal-agent theory. Using this as our lens, we suggest that the choices made by Mississippi in the area of welfare reform to privatize much of the work and to add several layers to the existing principal-agent relationship substantially reduced accountability and the effectiveness of the monitoring systems. We conclude that not only is traditional principal-agent theory an insufficient tool for understanding the complex interrelationship between democratic actors in this particular case, the decisions of the state of Mississippi to complicate the principal-actor relationship through privatization also undermined the reform effort itself in ways that may have general implications for other like-minded efforts in other policy areas.
There are those who are undermining what we are trying to achieve ...
—Bud Henry, Director of Economic Assistance, Mississippi Department of Human Services     

20世纪80年代以来英国福利制度改革述论

英国作为传统“福利国家”模型的代表,对西、北欧资本主义制度的发展产生过重要影响。20世纪80年代以来,英国以责任分担、适度私有化、削减福利支出为目标,在国民保险、公民住房、就业福利等方面对福利制度进行了全方位改革,成效初显。其改革反映出全球社会保障类型的逐步融通趋势,带有极强的时代特征。     

Implementing Welfare Reform in Kansas: Moving, But Not Racing

Will welfare reform lead some states to race to the bottom?At least for Kansas, the answer appears to be a resounding no.Data gathered as part of the State Capacity Study's analysisof welfare reform suggest that in Kansas, elected officialsand the bureaucracy have responded in a fashion consistent withthe state's political and administrative culture: cautiouslyand incrementally. First, Kansas' welfare reform policy hasbeen driven primarily by bureaucratic decisions. Welfare administrators,supported by the governor, have minimized legislative resistanceto their policy objectives. Second, from the perspective ofwelfare generosity, Kansas has not deviated significantly fromits typical "middle" position relative to other states' policies.Third, Kansas' administration of reform embraces three primarystrategies: decentralized management authority; new links withother agencies to tackle specific welfare problems; and a newlyintegrated approach to frontline welfare case-management.     

A Comparison of Disaster Paradigms: The Search for a Holistic Policy Guide

The following article discusses the current emphasis and attention being given to the future of emergency management, as well as theoretical constructs designed to guide research and help practitioners reduce disaster. It illustrates that while the disaster-resistant community, disaster-resilient community, and sustainable development/sustainable hazards mitigation concepts provide many unique advantages for disaster scholarship and management, they fail to sufficiently address the triggering agents, functional areas, actors, variables, and disciplines pertaining to calamitous events. In making this argument, the article asserts that any future paradigm and policy guide must be built on—yet go further than—comprehensive emergency management. The article also reviews and alters the concept of invulnerable development. Finally, the article presents "comprehensive vulnerability management" as a paradigm and suggests that it is better suited to guide scholarly and practitioner efforts to understand and reduce disasters than the aforementioned perspectives.     

Welfare Reform: Assessing its Political, Economic, and Social Effects

Books reviewed: Rebecca M. Blank, It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty Anne Marie Cammisa, From Rhetoric to Reform?: Welfare Policy in AmericanPolitics Martha Shirk, Neil G. Bennett, and J. Lawrence Aber, Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet Robert M. Solow, Work and Welfare     

Welfare Reform and Models of Public Policy: Why Policy Sciences Are Required

Policy could be studied on the basis of three different models: ideological, social science, and policy sciences. Policy in accordance with ideology may not necessarily rely on solid rigorous research to back it up. Policy made solely in accordance with a rigorous social science model might be able to demonstrate a causal relationship between a given policy and desired outcomes, and in the process establish a clear role for good research in the policy process. But it often fails to account for the larger social and political context in which policy is formulated. Good policy should be based on rigorous social science research, while also factoring in the values of the broader society, that is, ideology. This would imply that in order to bridge the gap, that good policy should be formulated in accordance with the policy sciences model because it connects the rigorous methodology of the social sciences with the larger social policy context, that is, the broader policy process. When analyzing the reform of 1996 within the framework of these models, it becomes clear that while the legislation is highly ideological, it is not based on any serious research that would satisfy the criteria of the social science model. It fails the policy sciences model, in part, because its absence of clearly defined objectives, or a single objective, makes the task of measurement difficult. On the contrary, this legislation is a good example of why the policy community would do better to rely more on the policy sciences.     

Structural Reform of Local Government in Australia: A Sustainable Amalgamation Model for Country Councils

Abstract. Council amalgamation has always been the major policy instrument for structural reform in Australian local government. While the Australian literature has spawned taxonomic attempts at classifying models of structural change in local government, a serious deficiency in this body of work has been the specification of amalgamation as an undifferentiated category embodying the unconditional merger of many small local authorities into a single larger entity. This paper seeks to remedy this problem by developing a model of sustainable amalgamation and contrasting it with unconditional amalgamation in using a stylised example derived from four existing Western Australian country shires contemplating consolidation.