What Trickled Down? Federalism, State Government Fiscal Stress, and Local Government Outcomes
Much has been written about a shift in federal to state relationships during the 1990s. Couched in terms of a renewed fiscal federalism, devolution, or even the heady rhetoric of “reinventing” government both resources and public service authority flowed to the state governments. Somewhat less was said at the time regarding state governments’ relationships with local governments or the extent of federal re-distributions of resources beyond state governments to local governments. This paper is an investigation of some of the federalism transformations that occurred in the past decade or so. In particular, it assesses the flow of resources and spending at all levels of government and sorts out which show changes in relationships.
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.
Promise of Welfare Reform
Abstract In the 1990s, devolution of authority from federal to states and local governmental institutions in the administration of social welfare policies, programs, and services is seen as an answer to alleviating poverty among low-income families with children. To this effect, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 has granted an option to tribal governments to administer their own Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) services. In this article we provide findings from early experience of tribes within Arizona in their attempt to self-administer TANF services. We collected and analyzed data from multiple sources, including a review of documents provided by the state and tribal members, in-depth telephone interviews with service providers on 15 of the 21 reservations, and site visits to four reservations at which we conducted group interviews with state and tribal social service providers. We found that under the 1996 welfare legislation, tribal gove...