Access Then Denial: Welfare, Social Control and Access to American Citizenry

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Contemporary Issues in US Politics: Identities, Technology, and Economic Policy

Abstract

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) has often been marked by the culmination of the political environment and racial diversity through increasingly punitive policy features such as sanctions. This paternalistic approach to poverty governance runs parallel to the hyper-politicized and gendered environment in which this welfare policy exists. This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding on the use of paternalism through sanctioning behavior as a mode of social control of the state, provides additional insight for the links between racial dynamics and policy design, and unpacks the ways social construction contributes to this end. Using an original time series cross section(TSCS) data set from 1999-2020 for the fifty states, I find evidence that states respond to racially diverse populations through TANF sanctioning behavior. By developing a new measure of state sanctioning, I find new evidence of partisan differences in this sanctioning behavior. These important findings provide additional support for the centrality of racial dynamics in state politics literature and especially within the welfare policy arena. This work also contributes to notions of policy-driven group formation, where policies do the work of allocating benefits and burdens to the public through TANF. Further, highlighting these processes and how they outline the bounds of citizenship in insightful new ways, builds on this broad literature and enlightens our discussion of the complex relationship between race, state politics, and welfare policy.

Author

• Naomi Nashell Nubin-Sellers