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State Welfare Reform and Political Partisanship, 1992–1996
Author(s) -
McGeever Patrick J.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
southeastern political review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 0730-2177
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.1999.tb00529.x
Subject(s) - governor , welfare , politics , state (computer science) , government (linguistics) , competition (biology) , welfare reform , political science , public administration , biology and political orientation , public economics , political economy , economics , law , engineering , philosophy , computer science , biology , aerospace engineering , ecology , linguistics , algorithm
Eighty‐six requests to the federal government for waivers to existing welfare law, made by forty‐three states between 1992 and 1996, are examined and grouped into twenty distinct types. The political party of the governor in the requesting state is used as the independent variable. Hypotheses are formulated based on received notions of the major parties' orientation toward welfare programs, alleging that Democrats would be more likely than Republicans to maintain or expand existing benefits or to offer new benefits, while Republicans would be more likely than Democrats to reduce their states' responsibilities toward the poor, to impose new behavioral requirements on recipients, and to seek waivers that might result in increased competition for low‐end jobs. The last of these hypotheses proves to be the most robust, while others are rejected entirely. It is concluded that statehouse Democrats may be abandoning the working poor, but their Republican counterparts are sedulously serving the needs of their business constituency.