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Welfare sanctions are financial penalties applied to individuals who fail to comply with welfare program rules. Their widespread use reflects a turn toward disciplinary approaches to poverty management. In this article, we investigate how implicit racial biases and discrediting social markers interact to shape officials' decisions to impose sanctions. We present experimental evidence based on hypothetical vignettes that case managers are more likely to recommend sanctions for Latina and black clients—but not white clients—when discrediting markers are present. We triangulate these findings with analyses of state administrative data. Our results for Latinas are mixed, but we find consistent evidence that the probability of a sanction rises significantly when a discrediting marker (i.e., a prior sanction for noncompliance) is attached to a black rather than a white welfare client. Overall, our study clarifies how racial minorities, especially African Americans, are more likely to be punished for deviant behavior in the new world of disciplinary welfare provision.

Berry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker. berry et al. (hereafter "BRFH") (1998) offer two measures of ideology in the American states, observed annually for years after 1959. 1 Their indicator of citizen ideology measures the average location of the active electorate in each state on a liberal-conservative continuum. Their government ideology indicator measures the average location of the elected officials in each state on the same continuum. The underlying continuum for both indicators is conceived as operational ideology (or policy mood)-the kinds of policies preferred-rather than self-identification (or symbolic ideology) Stimson 1991). These ideology indicators have proven useful in analyzing the impact of public opinion or the policy preferences of elected officials on a wide variety of state policy outputs, including welfare reform at UNIV OF GEORGIA LIBRARIES on June 9, 2015 spa.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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Recent findings from the literature on imprisonment policy suggest that in addition to traditional social and economic variables, imprisonment rates are also strongly related to changes in the state political environment. In this study, we extend this literature by testing a theory of state punitiveness which posits that (1) the political environment of states influences the degree to which they incarcerate their citizens, and (2) the political determinants of state punitiveness may be conditional upon the racial subpopulation being incarcerated. Our results suggest that increases in state political conservatism in recent decades have contributed to increases in both the growth in black imprisonment rates and black imprisonment disparity (relative to whites), but that these effects are, to a degree, tempered by countervailing political conditions. It is generally well understood that the rate of a government's imprisonmentthe percentage of its citizens incarcerated at a given time-is an effective gauge of its punitiveness (Greenberg and West 2001, 615). There is also reason to believe that the use of incarceration by governments is appropriately considered as being highly political in nature (Garland 1990;Mauer 2001). Laswell's (1936) well-known observation that "politics is the process by which it is determined who gets what, when and how," seems to ring especially true with regard to imprisonment policy. The government's ability to deprive citizens of liberty stands as one its most important and intrusive powers. Thus, determining who the government chooses to imprison and the conditions under which imprisonment rates rise or fall taps directly into Laswell's central question of the process of politics as well as the nature of the relationship between citizen and state.Trends in national imprisonment rates in recent decades bring to bear two equally important policy themes, the examination of which may provide important theoretical insights as to the political nature of governments' use of imprisonment: the rising rate of imprisonment generally and the prominent disparity between rates of imprisonment for blacks and whites. First, the political nature of incarceration policy has been highlighted by critics of the criminal justice system who note the weak connection in recent decades between the rapidly rising

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By analyzing state decision to give local authorities control over welfare policy, we seek to advance understandings of both the origins and the consequences of policy devolution. The first part of our analysis explores the political forces that systematically influence state decisions to cede policy control to lower-level jurisdictions. We propose a parsimonious Racial Classification model of how race influences social policy choice. Our findings strongly support this model as well as social control theory. Building on these results, we then show how modest but consistent racial effects on policy choices concatenate to produce large disparities in the overall policy regimes that racial groups encounter in the federal system. The empirical findings illuminate the fundamental role that federalism plays in the production of contemporary racial disparities and in the recent turn toward "neoliberal paternalism" in American poverty governance. 1For much of the twentieth century, intergovernmental relations in the United States followed a "cooperative" logic, with national government deeply involved in shaping and facilitating state and local action (Elazar 1984(Elazar , 1992. Since the 1970s, however, American federalism has undergone substantial change. National government has become more directive in mandating goals, enforcing standards, and preempting sub-national policies (Zimmerman 2001). At the same time, it has ceded vast amounts of control over policy tools to lower jurisdictions (Donahue 1997). In this latter development, the U.S. has followed a worldwide trend toward decentralized governance in an era of global market integration (Knox 1997). The construction of this new "devolution settlement" has been a central theme in recent American political development and has played a key role in the restructuring of the U.S. welfare state (Peck 2003).Given this historical context, it is striking how little students of American politics know about the forces that shape decisions to devolve policy authority. Most political scholarship on devolution in the U.S. has focused on "first-order" transfers of control from the national to the state level (e.g., Conlan 1998; Donahue 1997; Winston 2002). Despite a large comparative literature on devolution (Cook and Manor 1998;Sinha 2005), there have been few efforts to subject the U.S. case to a rigorous comparative historical analysis. Likewise, few have tried to gain analytic leverage on first-order devolution by comparing decisions across policy domains. As a result, scholars have been left with only historical narratives recounting how, by intention or default, control over policy tools has moved downward in particular policy areas. Today, students of American politics have far more to say about the consequences of devolution than about how, why, and when policy control gets devolved (cf. Peterson 1995).Under what conditions do higher levels of government become more likely to cede policy control to lower-level jurisdictions? By pursuing this question, we seek ...