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Party Cleavages and Welfare Effort in the American States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert D. Brown
Robert D. Brown
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
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Abstract

Attempts to determine the impact of party control on state welfare policy have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part due to our inability to account for variations in the state partisan environments. I used CBS/New York Times surveys combined over the period 1976–88 to offer a detailed examination of the state party systems, resulting in a description of the dominant social group partisan cleavage in each state. This information is then used to examine the impact of party control on state welfare benefits. The findings show that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states. These differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort. Specifically, party control has a significantly greater impact in states where partisan divisions reflect class-based New Deal-type coalitions. When examined in the context of state partisan environments, party control has a much greater impact on state welfare effort than has been suggested by previous studies.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 23 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1995

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