Scandals, Lawsuits, and Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the U.S. States

Abstract

Abstract In order to understand what factors drive child welfare policymaking, this research analyzes data on spending and legislation from the U.S. states over a three-year period. The key independent variables are scandal, litigation, federal oversight, and local discretion. While states that experience a scandal or a lawsuit do not increase their spending levels over previous years, they do enact more child welfare legislation. This raises the possibility that states engage in symbolic rather than substantive responses to child welfare crises. The administrative structure of the child welfare system also affects state policymaking.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.