There has been considerable recent debate regarding proposed policies that would allow foster care administrators to discriminate on the basis of the sexual orientation of the foster parent. To date, however, we know very little about the level of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the foster care system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation to ask whether foster care agencies, the public and nonprofit firms that facilitate foster care placements, respond similarly to emails sent by fictitious same-sex and heterosexual couples who inquire about becoming foster parents. Our results suggest that while foster care agencies respond at somewhat similar rates to gay male couples, gay female couples and heterosexual couples, responses sent to gay males are of lower quality. Gay males receive much shorter responses that take longer to receive. Responses to gay male couples are also less likely to include key pieces of information about the process of becoming a foster parent, such as information about informational sessions or being given an application. We do not find any evidence of differential treatment towards same-sex female couples.

No abstract

Objective. In the United States, state social services rarely coordinate across departments, a practice that could both increase receipt and reduce administrative burden. The purpose of this article is to investigate the state-level conditions associated with the adoption of policies that benefit participants in multiple social welfare programs, focusing on the case of the child support income exclusion for SNAP benefit eligibility calculations. Methods. Using annual data for each of the states (including the District of Columbia), we estimate multiple analyses to test three hypotheses regarding which factors are associated with policy adoption. Results. We find that collaboration across social programs is more likely as state income tax revenues increase and when administrative costs are lower. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that state revenue and administrative costs are associated with state interagency alignment but find only weak evidence that political ideology is a factor. The government-provided social safety net in the United States is a complex web of programs that supply both cash and in-kind benefits to low-income families. Different components of the system were created at different points in time, and are managed by multiple local, state, and federal agencies. As a result, there are holes and overlap in the structure of the safety net, resulting in both unmet needs and redundancy. Frequently, low-income families suffer from this system with large time-costs waiting for caseworker approval and a heavy paperwork burden. Further, the rules are complex and it is difficult to know the benefits for which one qualifies. The end result often is an underutilization of programs both through a lack of awareness and considerable caseload churn (Herd and Moynihan, 2018). Additionally, social programs that were designed to meet the needs of the caseload at the time they were enacted have been slow to respond to the demographic shifts in family complexity, such as growth in the number of births to unmarried parents, multipartnered fertility, and the high prevalence of divorce and remarriage (Carlson and Meyer, 2014). Given the intricacies of our current social policy environment, we seek to understand the factors that lead to interagency coordination between social welfare programs to increase

In the United States, the SNAP and TANF programs provide financial support to low-income households with children. Yet, little is known about the extent of this support over the early childhood period or how program participation varies by race (or ethnicity) and metropolitan county residence. We use administrative data from Virginia to document participation in SNAP and TANF among children born between 2007 and 2010 during their early childhood period, which we define here as birth to age six. We find that participation in SNAP is about four times greater than participation in TANF and that most children begin their connection with the social welfare system in their birth year. Children who participate earlier in life tend to stay connected over a longer portion of the early childhood period, although SNAP participation peaks around ages 3–4 while TANF peaks earlier, around ages 2–3. Most households on SNAP do not receive TANF, but only about 1 in 12 children on TANF do not receive SNAP. Finally, over the early childhood period, on average, just under 1 in 2 children in Virginia participated in SNAP or TANF but demography plays an important role in this process: The level of cumulative receipt is 1 in 4 among White children, 1 in 2 among Hispanic children but rises to 3 in 4 for Black children; cumulative receipt is also higher in nonmetropolitan counties than metropolitan counties. This study documents the reach of the existing social welfare system during the early childhood period, underlining the importance of race and space in twenty-first century America. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-021-09660-9.

Recent laws and court rulings have increased legal protections for faith-based organizations that refuse to provide services to certain individuals based on deeply held religious beliefs. Using data from a 2019 email correspondence study, we examine if religiously-affiliated foster care agencies respond to inquiries from white same-sex couples differently from public and secular foster care agencies. This paper provides preliminary, descriptive results that public sector discrimination can vary by the type of organization that is providing the service. We find suggestive evidence that religiously-affiliated foster care agencies are less likely to respond to same-sex male couples. However, this study lacks sufficient statistical power to find conclusive evidence of differential treatment by type of organization, which highlights the challenges of conducting correspondence studies that examine intersectional discrimination. Despite this limitation, we argue that it is increasingly important for scholars of public administration and public policy to examine and understand how discrimination in the public sector may vary by group membership or organizational type. While exploring this intersectional discrimination may be limited in certain contexts, understanding how and why organizations and public servants are more or less likely to respond to particular groups is an important first step in designing interventions or crafting policies to reduce differential treatment.