Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Understanding Welfare As We Know It: A Comprehensive and Updated Mixed-Methods Analysis on the Relationship between Public Opinion and Welfare Policies

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  • After the 1996 national welfare reform known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was enacted with more stringent eligibility and work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, a plethora of analyses have followed assessing the impact of the new components and how to improve such programs to assist those in need. However, in order for such improvements to happen, it is necessary to go through the intricate process of welfare politics that has been increasingly marked by party polarization. When this happens, new proposals are often stalled or fail to get momentum to even be introduced in the first place. This dissertation analyzes potential avenues to navigate this system and expand our welfare programs by observing the social construction and determinants of public opinion on welfare programs and recipients under our current scenario. Close attention is also paid to whether opinion impact welfare programs at the state-level, which has been a more relevant arena for action after PRWORA delegated more responsibility to the states to run welfare programs. In the first article, I use the Policy Design and Social Construction (PDSC) theory and a dictionary-based content analysis to examine a total of 10 committee hearings and floor debates (total of 3244 pages) during the final stages of the deliberations for PRWORA to understand who were the main policy actors and strategies behind the dominant social construction of welfare recipients as deviants. While, as expected, Republican legislators and conservative advocates were the main actors pushing this social construction forward, Democrats also contributed to its dominance by not being sufficiently active and reproducing some aspects of it when offering a different solution. I also find that while intersectionality barely featured in the hearings and debates, public opinion was used in a general manner by referring to all Americans, and more strategic to advance some claims defending the provisions of the bill. Article 2 turns attention more to the role of public opinion in this process, examining the major determinants of public opinion about welfare by updating previous analyzes that were conducted around the 1980s and 1990s and expanding the sample to include racial minorities who were often excluded in such works. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) to run multinomial logistic regressions, I compare opinions across racial groups regarding welfare policies, assistance to the poor, and social security. It seems that political ideology is the only consistent predictor of opinion across all models and racial groups. More determinants seem to come into play in relation to welfare spending, particularly the persistence of racial attitudes, as opposed to assistance to the poor and social security, demonstrating the higher polarization around welfare policy debates. Article 3 investigates whether such opinion influences how generous welfare programs are at the state-level. With data mainly from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and the welfare generosity index developed by Fox et al (2020), I use the multilevel and poststratification (MRP) method to estimate state public opinion through national surveys. The results are more aligned with the literature that is skeptical of the impact of public opinion on policy, with public opinion showing no significant effect on TANF or SNAP generosity, even after controlling for electoral versus non-electoral years. It seems that the ideology of the state government and the state poverty rate are the major factors affecting state welfare generosity, although their effects differed between the two programs. I conclude with an overview of the main findings and potential policy recommendations.
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