Revisiting Shapiro: Welfare Magnets and State Residency Requirements in the 1990s

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity ReconciliationAct of 1996 (PRWORA) generated renewed interest in welfare racesto the bottom as states received greater discretion over eligibilitystandards for new residents. Despite U.S. Supreme Court decisionsfinding welfare-residency requirements unconstitutional andmounting empirical evidence that welfare benefits do not attractpoor migrants, state policymakers have enacted welfare-reformplans that treat newcomers differently as authorized in PRWORA.This article reviews the existing research on welfare migration,current state-residency requirements, and central constitutionalissues surrounding such requirements. With the likelihood thatcourts will have the final word on the current round of statewelfare-residency requirements, it is essential that empiricalresearch on welfare magnets examine the issues central to thecases currently moving through the judicial system.     

The “Indo-Pacific”—New Regional Formulations and New Maritime Frameworks for US-India Strategic Convergence

This article argues three things. First, it argues that at the conceptual level there has been a strategic rediscovery of a maritime regional framework, the Indo-Pacific. Second, it argues that at the policy level there is a significant regional security convergence, a degree of strategic balancing, between India and the United States in this Indo-Pacific. Third, it argues that at the causal level there is a common maritime challenge from China faced by India in the Indian Ocean and by the United States in the Pacific Ocean, a common Indo-Pacific strategic challenge which is generating this significant US-India naval convergence. In order to deal with such matters, the article looks at the strategic discourse employed around the concept of the Indo-Pacific, and the related maritime assets deployed in the Indo-Pacific by the United States and India.     

Are We Civilized Yet?

The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.     

Coercive Leadership

We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.     

Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.