The US has experienced runaway economic inequality since the 1970s, yet there is no strong public support for government efforts that serve to narrow the growing disparities between citizens. Why? I point to the role of rising racial diversity. I argue Americans believe in conditional equality, where they support equalizing policies as long as they perceive the beneficiaries as people like themselves. However, as the country grows more diverse, citizens are less likely to perceive those around them as people like themselves. Using time-series cross-sectional data of the American states, I demonstrate that as racial diversity increases, the likelihood the public will respond to increasing inequality by supporting bigger government declines. This study provides evidence for the mechanism usually implied but rarely tested by studies of diversity and policy: mass preferences.

Young people experience different treatment compared to older adults in the English welfare and homelessness systems, encountering varying levels of protection and disadvantage. This paper uses a value-pluralist perspective to explore the normative rationales for and the ethical defensibility of these policy differences. Evidence from 38 key informant interviews suggests that the English homelessness system is shifting towards a vulnerability-oriented response to young people. But an inconsistent value framework within the welfare system systematically disadvantages them without offering a corresponding degree of protection. As such, these closely-connected areas of social policy pull in opposing directions. Although individual positions targeting young people may (to greater and lesser extents) be justifiable, this disparity in values creates an incoherent and indefensible welfare policy landscape for this group.

Scholars have argued that negative attitudes toward government inhibit support for redistributive policies, while other studies show that individual attitudes toward the rich and the poor shape support for redistribution. How these individual attitudes relate to support for redistribution together has seldom been examined. Using the third round of the Life in Transition Survey (fielded in 2016, including 29 countries transitioning from communism) and outcome variables that tap into general attitudes about closing the income gap between the rich and the poor and willingness to pay more to help the needy, we examine how individual attitudes toward government, as well as the rich and the poor are associated with support for redistribution (final analyzed sample n > 23,700). Using logit multivariate regression analysis, we find that trust in government institutions and perceptions of public corruption are associated with certain redistributive attitudes, while individual attitudes toward the rich and the poor are consistently associated with both the general beliefs that income gaps in the country should be reduced and individual levels of willingness to pay more to help the needy.

Fatherhood is a key but missing component of research on welfare regimes. What do states formally demand from fatherhood across Latin America? Using a novel data set of coded legal and policy provisions for 19 Latin American countries, this article offers a conceptual framework to examine state interventions targeting biological, caregiving and breadwinning dimensions of fatherhood. My findings show that, regardless of how robust their social policies are, most countries presume fatherhood to be complementary rather than co-responsible to motherhood. By making a conceptual, empirical and practical contribution to studying the state regulation of fatherhood, this article contributes to a more comprehensive view of welfare regimes.

Considerable research shows that welfare policies are stricter in states with large African American caseloads. We challenge the universality of this claim by extending Soss, Fording, and Schram's Racial Classification Model to account for the multidimensionality of policy, the constraints imposed by federal funding, and state legislators' ideological goals and racial stereotypes. Examining the work requirements, sanctions, time limits, and exemptions in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), we test our hypotheses using the most detailed measures of state welfare policy yet examined. Consistent with our theory, we show that policy is more generous on some dimensions and less generous on others as the size of the African American caseload increases. This pattern reveals a complexity in welfare policy previously overlooked by research showing only negative effects. The results have important implications for theories addressing race in the context of TANF and other complex policy regimes.

As spending on welfare in the United States has increased over time, preferences for more spending have remained fairly stationary. Given that previous research shows that the public adjusts its welfare spending preference thermostatically in response to welfare spending, the over-time pattern of preferences implies that something must be producing an increase in public support, but what? We address this question, focusing on individuals' demographics and a set of aggregate economic variables, both macroeconomic and distributional. Results reveal that individual-level factors matter little to the temporal variation and aggregate economics matter a lot: there are pro-cyclical and counter-cyclical elements in spending preferences and a dampening effect of income inequality over time. The combination of these variables accounts for the underlying trend in welfare spending preferences in the US, and the method used to reveal these dynamics can be used to analyze preference evolution in other spending domains and countries.

Spouses (and partners) are the most important source of care in old age. Informal care for frail spouses is provided by both sexes and across all socio-economic backgrounds and welfare policy contexts. There are, however, interesting differences as to whether spouses care alone, receive informal support from other family members or formal support from professional helpers, or outsource the care of their spouse completely. The present article contributes to the literature by differentiating between solo spousal care-giving and shared or outsourced care-giving arrangements, as well as between formal and informal care support. Moreover, we show how care-giving arrangements vary with gender, socio-economic status and welfare policy. Adding to previous research, we compare 17 countries and their expenditures on two elder-care schemes: Cash-for-Care and Care-in-Kind. The empirical analyses draw on the most recent wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data from 2015. Our results show that men have a higher propensity to share care-giving than women, albeit only with informal supporters. As expected, welfare policy plays a role insofar as higher expenditure on Cash-for-Care schemes encourage informally outsourced care-giving arrangements, whereas Care-in-Kind reduce the likelihood for informally shared or outsourced care-giving arrangements. Moreover, the influence of these welfare policy measures differs between individuals of different socio-economic status but not between men and women.

This article examines the impact of electoral politics on state welfare policy in the post-civil rights era South. In contrast to an emerging consensus concluding that southern African Americans materially benefited from rejoining the electorate, this study suggests that higher black registration rates actually reduced states' poverty relief efforts. In the years immediately following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), when Democrats controlled state government, the significant negative relationship between the size of the black electorate and state welfare generosity was moderated to some extent by high levels of partisan competition. In such cases, Democrats ostensibly chose a “core” targeting strategy of pursuing lower-income votes and had the institutional wherewithal to purchase these votes with policy concessions. Overall, however, the liberal “Downsian” policy response to African American mobilization was dominated by an antiredistributive response. In the South, welfare policies were relatively conservative vis-à-vis the other states during Jim Crow and became more so in response to black voting.

Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

In this article, I evaluate whether a state's level of bureaucratic discretionary authority with respect to welfare policy makes that state more or less likely to participate in policy diffusion with other states that share similar levels of bureaucratic discretionary authority. Using data on levels of access to welfare services in the late Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) era (1976–90), I find that bureaucrats across states who are granted high-discretionary authority engage in policy diffusion with one another. Diffusion based on similarity in discretionary authority is more pronounced when bureaucrats possess high compared with no discretion and does not occur when bureaucrats possess low discretion. Moreover, diffusion between high-discretion bureaucrats operates concurrently with geographic- and economic-driven forms of diffusion that have been well documented in the policy diffusion literature. Results demonstrate that a state's choice of how much discretion to give bureaucrats can open or close channels of diffusion that are available to policymakers in that state.

This paper reviews three UK-based welfare-to-work programmes featuring time-limited financial incentives to leave out-of-work benefits for employment. The policies considered are (i) the Employment Retention and Advancement demonstration, aimed at lone parents and the long-term unemployed; (ii) In-Work Credit, aimed at lone parents on welfare; (iii) Pathways to Work, aimed at recipients of incapacity benefits. I illustrate the difficulties in extrapolating from specific findings to general policy-relevant conclusions. Finally, I depict the challenge facing evaluators in future and point to the directions in which evaluation will need to develop if it is to contribute more fully to policy-relevant evaluation.