Spatial Inequality in Government Welfare Office Locations across the U.S.

• In Event: Public Policy and Spatial Politics in American Political Economy

Abstract

The provision of welfare programs in the United States can be extremely fragmented due to their decentralized administration and the long tradition of federalism. This decentralization has the potential to create and exacerbate many types of inequalities, often disadvantaging already vulnerable populations. Inequality in welfare program access takes many forms, and one understudied component is spatial inequality in government provision of welfare programs.

Most people who are eligible for means-tested government programs choose to complete some aspect of the application or enrollment process in-person, often at a local welfare office. The location of these offices therefore matters because some people live or work in close physical proximity, and others have to travel long distances. From interviews with means-tested program recipients as part of my prior work, I learned that distance required to travel local welfare offices impacts the likelihood of completing the enrollment process for government programs, as oftentimes multiple trips are required to bring physical documents that verify identity, address, and/or income or complete other steps. In other words, the difficulty—or ease—of getting physically to one’s local welfare office is one important type of administrative burden.

Administrative burden, “the experience of policy implementation as onerous” (Burden et al. 2012, p. 741), consists of learning, psychology, and compliance costs that citizens experience when interacting with the government (Herd and Moynihan 2018). Traveling to a local welfare office can be considered a compliance cost, a burden of meeting the requirements to access government programs. Travel can also incur psychological costs, such as the stress or frustration associated with determining the logistics for getting to the local welfare office. Extensive prior research on burdensome means-tested program administration has demonstrated that higher burdens depress policy take-up. We can consider administrative burdens to be institutional-level factors that ultimately affect poverty (and poverty alleviation).

In this paper, I argue that the location of a local welfare office is a significant piece of the administrative burden of accessing means-tested programs. It is therefore important to understand to what extent travel distance to local welfare offices varies across the U.S. While many states have just one local welfare office location for each county, there is significant variation across the U.S., though no dataset has previously existed to demonstrate this empirically.

This paper examines the location of local welfare offices in all states across the country and how distance to the nearest welfare office is related to community factors. I will leverage an original dataset that I created by searching state agency websites for all the addresses of states’ local welfare offices and computing the distance between the geographic centroid of each census block group (typically between 600 and 3,000 habitants) and the nearest welfare office. Combining this data with American Community Survey data available at narrow geographic levels, I can answer questions such as: To what extent do spatial inequalities exist across the U.S. in access to in-person welfare offices? How does the variation in accessibility to a local welfare office a relate to poverty rate and population size? What other factors are related to average distance to the nearest welfare office?

One might intuit that local welfare offices would be intentionally located in places with high local poverty rates, or with a large population, or both. Scott Allard’s rich mixed methods study of “safety net” service accessibility in three cities demonstrates that welfare service providers are often not located in high-poverty neighborhoods (2008), contrary to expectations. Building on prior literature that has demonstrated deep racialization and political polarization of the welfare state, I will also examine the extent to which racial composition and ideological preferences are related to average distance to the local welfare office.

This paper will speak to the consequences of the decentralized and fragmented public welfare state, a key tenet of the American political economy. I also contribute to the rapidly-growing literature on administrative burden. To my knowledge, this paper will be the first study to describe the spatial landscape of government welfare office provision across the U.S.

Author

• Meredith Dost, University of Wisconsin, Madison