Welfare Policymaking and Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in U.S. State Legislatures

Abstract

Welfare policy in the American states has been shaped profoundly by race, ethnicity, and representation. Does gender matter as well? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid-1990s, we test hypotheses derived from two alternative approaches to incorporating gender into the study of representation and welfare policymaking. An additive approach, which assumes gender and race/ethnicity are distinct and independent, suggests that female state legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their African American and Latino counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which highlights the overlapping and interdependent nature of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. Our empirical analyses suggest an intersectional approach yields a more accurate understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and welfare politics in the states.

The Influence of Women Legislators on State Health Care Spending for the Poor

“…Mendelberg et al assert, "women's descriptive representation does produce substantive representation but primarily under majority rule-when women are many, they are more likely to voice women's distinctive concerns about children, family, the poor and the needy, and less likely to voice men's distinctive concerns" ( [48], p. 291). In their multivariate study of TANF policies across the states in 1998, Reingold and Smith [18] find that women's influence, if present, is a result of a combination of absolute numbers as well as legislative incorporation into leadership (a finding consistent with Preuhs' [49] analysis of minority legislators).…”

“…The literature on aggregate-level women's representation employs three general approaches for translating descriptive representation into policy influence (e.g., [12,14,18,28,49,69]). Various studies use the simple percentage of women in a state's legislature on the assumption that, as this percentage grows, so too does the capacity for influencing substance.…”

“…In another comparative state analysis, Reingold and Smith observed what also appear to be contradictory results. Depending upon which policies were examined the presence of women legislators had "a liberal effect, a conservative effect, or no effect" ( [18], p. 132); their intersectional approach (which examined both race and gender) produced more consistently liberal results. Overall, the findings from the literature exploring the main effect of women's representation on relevant policy outcomes remain ambiguous.…”

“…Moreover, adult women often keep closer track and are more keenly aware of their parents' situations than men, and they routinely bear the lion's share of the care-giving provided by family members to elderly parents. Consequently, Medicaid's coverage of personal care and home/community-based services is especially crucial to elder and disabled women, with one in ten women relying on Medicaid for health [18]. According the Census Bureau, during the period under study, between seventeen and twenty-two percent of children in the United States (15.75 million in 2010) lived in poverty, making the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) especially salient [60].…”

“…While women elected officials do tend to be more supportive of "women's issues" than men, their influence is reflective of the contexts they inhabit. Indeed, scholars have recently begun to challenge the presumption of universal support by demonstrating distinctions in the ways in which women legislators behave (see [6,17,18]). …”