Does Anti - Poverty Advocacy Matter ? Interest Groups and State Policy Choices after Welfare

Under the federal structure of the United States government, states play a central role in interpreting and implementing national social policies. Understanding the processes that shape state-level social policy decisions is therefore important for understanding whether national commitments to low-income citizens are realized in practice. Within the political science literature, scholars have drawn attention to the way in which racial politics and economic and political pressure contribute to social policy choices across states. Yet few systematically evaluate the role of organizational actors in shaping state-level social policies. In this paper, I examine the relationship between organizational advocacy and state welfare policy choices following the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) to provide insight into the factors that shape how national policies are translated into action at the state level. Under the PRWORA, the national government ended its 60-year guarantee of cash assistance to needy families, and granted states increased discretion over many programmatic aspects of the welfare program. Using a unique dataset of organizational actors and state welfare policy choices, I analyze whether such actors shaped states’ decisions to further reduce the government’s commitment to low-income families on the one hand, or enact policies designed to provide additional supports to families on the other. Preliminary analyses point to the importance of actors in preventing the adoption of punitive policies, but not in facilitating the adoption of policies that assisted welfare recipients in their transition off of the welfare program. This suggests that organizational actors play an important role in shaping how national policies are interpreted across states, but also speaks to their limitations.