Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

By Lael R. Keiser, P. Mueser, Seung-Whan Choi. 2004

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although nonwhites are sanctioned at lower rates than whites overall, nonwhites are sanctioned more compared to whites in each local area. This paradox occurs because nonwhites tend to live in areas with lower sanction rates. Consistent with the literature on race and policy, we find that sanction rates increase as the nonwhite population increases until a threshold is reached where nonwhites gain political power.

Subfields: Gender Studies, General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f855389df9ecddd9e7c0a8b4e4718023354d8f9

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In Gender Studies

In General Health Professions

Lars Tummers

In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

Devolution, Discretion, and the Effect of Local Political Values on TANF Sanctioning (2007, unknown): “likely to attribute poverty to individual shortcomings and therefore may be less sympathetic to TANF clients who have fallen out of compliance with TANF rules (Keiser et al. 2004).”
Which Clients are Deserving of Help? : A Theoretical Model and Experimental Test (2018, background): “Street-level bureaucrats often base their decisions of which clients to prioritize on client attributes that tap the prevailing social/professional category of deservingness (Hasenfeld and Steinmetz 1981; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Keiser et al. 2004; Lipsky 1980; Tummers 2017).”
Deciding to Discipline: Race, Choice, and Punishment at the Frontlines of Welfare Reform (2009, result): “…with the findings of past studies of sanctioning (Born, Caudill, and Cordero 1999; Fording et al. 2007; Hasenfeld et al. 2004; Kalil et al. 2002; Keiser et al. 2004; Koraleck 2000; Mancuso and Lindler 2001; Wu et al. 2006).22 Moving to our main hypotheses of interest, we find no evidence in the…”