Does state AFDC generosity affect child SSI participation?

This article examines the extent of interactions or spillovers between the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs for children. In the early 1990s, the Social Security Administration substantially relaxed child eligibility criteria for SSI benefits. Since the changes, the number of U.S. children receiving cash and medical benefits through SSI tripled to nearly 1 million. The article describes a family's decision to participate in SSI and/or AFDC, and uses state‐level data for three years before, and three years after, the Zebley decision to estimate the effect of state program generosity on child program participation. The expansions in child SSI eligibility increased child SSI participation and contributed to increased total program participation by children in the early 1990s. Child SSI participation increased more in states with lower AFDC payments and higher state SSI supplementation payments. These results suggest that families use SSI and AFDC as substitutes. At least 32 percent of the Zebley increase in SSI is likely attributable to the SSI–AFDC benefit gap for the median AFDC benefit state. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.     

Preventing construction deaths: The role of public policies

Are stronger direct financial incentives or regulatory enforcement effective in reducing fatalities in the construction industry? We examine two important policies—state workers' compensation (WC) programs and federal and state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) activities—which embody those strategies. We examine their impact by looking at state-level fatality rates in the construction industry from 1992 to 2016. Setting aside highway crashes and violence, the majority of employee deaths occur in construction. We find that states which exempt small firms from the requirement to buy WC insurance have higher fatality rates. When eligibility for compensation is restricted by longer waiting periods, fatality rates are substantially higher. More frequent federal or state OSHA inspections and, especially, consultation visits are associated with lower fatality rates, but higher average penalties are not. Limited variation in these policies over our sample period, especially for WC, makes these results suggestive rather than definitively causal.     

A Bridge Too Far? Examining Bridging Assumptions in Common-Space Estimations

While most common-space estimations rely upon members who served in both the House and Senate as “bridges” to scale the remaining members, this assumes that these “bridge members” do not change their preferences when they change chambers. Such an assumption conflicts with standard notions of representation, that is, that legislators’ votes reflect (at least to some degree) the wishes of their constituents. We examine the constancy of this common-space voting assumption by focusing on a subset of House members who move to the Senate: those who come from statewide House districts. Using these members as the bridge actors—and thus bridging by constituency explicitly—in a one-dimensional item response theory model, we find that the standard assumption of chamber switchers in common-space estimations is technically, but immaterially, false. While there are statistically distinguishable differences in House and Senate voting records for chamber switchers, they are not sufficiently large to meaningfully undermine bridging.     

Introduction: rising powers and the future of global governance

There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by examining how challenges to global governance by rising powers are rooted in specific state–society configurations. Through studies of Brazil, India, China and other important developing countries within their respective regions, such as Turkey and South Africa, the papers examine the way domestic structures, arrangements, actors and dynamics influence the nature of the international interventions and behaviour of rising powers. They ask how their increased political and economic enmeshment in the international system impacts upon their own internal societal cohesion and development. By examining these issues, the papers raise the question of whether the challenge posed by the rising powers to global governance is likely to lead to an increase in democracy and social justice for the majority of the world’s peoples.     

Identity and democracy in the Baltics

The purpose of this essay is to consider the probable impact of issues related to ethnic and cultural identity on democratization in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Particular attention will be given to the demographic make‐up of the Baltic states, which are home to a high percentage of Slavs (mostly Russians but also Belarusians, Poles, and Ukrainians), and to those factors which affect how these Slavs and the majority Baits: (1) identify themselves; and (2) identify with the new states in which they find themselves. The key question is the degree to which civic democracy can prosper in a newly emerging multi‐ethnic state. The answer is important not only for the Baltic states but also for the other new multinational states that have emerged from the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe in the past few years.