Illustrations vii Tables ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 PART I Theory 23 CHAPTER 1 A Theory of Immigration Backlash Politics 25 PART II Views on Immigration and Defection to the Republican Party 61 CHAPTER 2 Immigration, Latinos, and the Transformation of White Partisanship 63 CHAPTER 3 How Immigration Shapes the Vote 88 PART III Understanding the Roots of the Backlash 113 CHAPTER 4 The Geography of the Immigration Backlash 115 CHAPTER 5 Media Coverage of Immigration and White Macropartisanship 154 PART IV The Consequences 181 CHAPTER 6 The Policy Backlash 183 CONCLUSION Implications for A Deeply Divided United States 201 References 217 Index 233

http://weber.ucsd.edu/%7Ezhajnal/resources/white-backlash-manuscript.pdf

White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics

In this article, we seek to advance scholarship on the origins and consequences of policy devolution by analyzing state decisions to give local authorities control over welfare policy. The first part of our analysis explores the political forces that systematically influence state decisions to cede policy control to lower-level jurisdictions. In this context, we propose a general Racial Classification Model of how race influences social policy choice. Our findings support this model as well as social control perspectives on welfare provision. 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 and paternalist policies in American poverty governance.

/pdf/the-color-of-devolution-race-federalism-and-the-politics-of-nj3mju94k4.pdf

The Color of Devolution: Race, Federalism, and the Politics of Social Control

State support of public higher education has rapidly declined relative to total state spending. Much of this decline in support is due to the rapid growth in spending on such things as Medicaid. However, relative support of public higher education varies significantly between states. This study applies Tandberg’s (2009) fiscal policy framework created to explain state support of public higher education in order to evaluate the relationship between various factors and states’ relative support of higher education. While Tandberg’s fiscal policy framework accounts for traditional economic and demographic factors in explaining state support for higher education, it also draws attention to political influences as well including the impact of state-level interest groups. Using cross-sectional time-series analysis these relationships are explored over a 19-year period. The findings provide evidence of the significant impact of interest groups and politics on state fiscal policy in regard to higher education.

Politics, interest groups and state funding of public higher education

The inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities is often considered an important factor leading to a relatively limited American welfare system. However, given the federal nature of welfare eligibility rules and the states' role in determining benefit levels, few studies explicitly link questions of inclusion and benefit levels when explaining the evolution of American welfare policy. This study examines the relationship between inclusion and benefit levels by analyzing state policies related to the welfare reforms of 1996 which allowed states to decide if recent immigrants would be included in welfare benefits, and subsequently the extent to which this decision affected overall benefit levels offered by states under TANF. The results suggest that states' decisions regarding inclusion subsequently affect benefit levels, with the direction of these relationships most closely reflecting the erosion model's prediction of broader eligibility associated with lower benefit levels.

Immigration and the Evolving American Welfare State: Examining Policies in the U.S. States

Despite a substantial increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority lawmakers across the United States, scholars have been unable to demonstrate that diversification of representative bodies increases minority group influence over policy decisions outside of small local governing boards. These null findings, however, are primarily due to underspecified empirical designs that do not account for the conditioning effects of racialized political contexts and majority party coalition membership. Using state-level data on welfare benefit levels and a survey of black state legislators, this study shows that black descriptive representation exerts policy influence outside of local governing bodies, but that a highly racialized political context and party control condition the nature and degree of policy influence.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00447.x

The Conditional Effects of Minority Descriptive Representation: Black Legislators and Policy Influence in the American States

Federal law allows states to create new welfare policies determining who can receive welfare, what types of clients are exempted from new welfare work requirements, and the value of cash benefits. This project tests nine different theoretical explanations of welfare policy to explain why states have reacted differently to this new authority. We test these explanations on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) policies promulgated between 1997 and 2000. Our findings confirm the strong role of race in TANF politics that Soss et al. (2001) recently reported, but we also find that other constituent characteristics, and institutions, paternalistic goals, and state resources have a consistent influence on welfare policy. These results indicate that different approaches to welfare are attributable to the unique, and very potent, combination of political characteristics in each state.

Gretchen Rowe

Papers

Politics and the New American Welfare States