Richard C. Fording

A New Measure of State Government Ideology, and Evidence that Both the New Measure and an Old Measure Are Valid

We modify Berry et al.’s congressional-delegation-based measure of state government ideology to construct a new measure—which we call the state-legislative-based state government ideology measure—by relying on Shor and McCarty’s National Political Awareness Test common space estimates of the ideal points of U.S. state legislators. We conduct tests of convergent and construct validity for the two measures. We find that they correlate highly in each year for which the state-legislative-based indicator is available (1995–2008), and when observations are pooled across all years. We also replicate numerous published studies assessing the impact of state government ideology using each indicator of ideology and find that the two measures nearly always yield similar conclusions about the effect of government ideology. Because the state-legislative-based measure is based on more direct estimates of the ideal points of state legislators than is the congressional-delegation-based measure—which uses estimates of ideal points for members of Congress from the same state as a proxy—we believe the state-legislative-based measure is superior, and we recommend that scholars use it when it is available for the state-years being studied. Because our empirical evidence indicates that Berry et al.’s congressional-delegation-based measure is also valid—and it is available for a much longer period (annually beginning in 1960)—we advise that it be used when the state-legislative-based measure is not available.

Do Welfare Sanctions Help or Hurt the Poor? Estimating the Causal Effect of Sanctioning on Client Earnings

This article examines the effect of financial sanctions for noncompliance on the earnings of TANF clients. Current research on TANF sanctioning is descriptive, and few studies estimate the effect of sanctions on client outcomes. To estimate the causal effect of sanctioning, we utilize longitudinal data from Florida and a difference-in-difference propensity-score matching estimator. We compare the growth in earnings of sanctioned clients to a comparable sample of nonsanctioned clients four quarters after exiting TANF and find that sanctioning has a statistically significant negative effect on earnings among TANF clients. The effect is consistent across racial groups, larger among clients with at least 12 years of schooling, and generally increases with the frequency of sanctioning. The finding that sanctioned clients exhibit significantly lower growth in earnings than similar nonsanctioned clients suggests that sanctioning may serve to undermine TANF’s goals of reducing welfare use and improving earnings in severely disadvantaged families.

From Work Support to Work Motivator: Child Care Subsidies and Caseworker Discretion in the Post-Welfare Reform Era

The 1996 legislative reform of welfare shifted provision away from cash assistance and toward a litany of work-support services, central among which are child care subsidies (Allard 2009). As part of a larger study of welfare reform in Florida, we conducted semistructured field interviews with more than 50 welfare transition caseworkers in four purposively selected regions. Consistent with Lipsky’s emphasis on worker decisions as concrete manifestations of policy intentions, we find that caseworkers’ interpretations of the priorities of TANF have substantial influence over decision making regarding the use and withdrawal of child care subsidies.

Do voter preferences matter between elections? Democratic performance in Western Democracies

Over the years, several studies have examined government responsiveness and congruence in Western democracies by examining the relationship between the ideological positions of voters and governments. Although these studies generally find high levels of responsiveness and congruence, this research is limited by the fact that it has focused exclusively on governments that formed immediately after an election, thus implicitly ignoring governments that form between elections. This is an important omission, we argue, owing to both the number of governments that form between elections (nearly half in our sample of Western democracies) and theoretical expectations that suggest that responsiveness and congruence may look quite different in the absence of an election. In this paper, we reassess levels of democratic performance across 22 Western democracies utilizing data for all governments formed during the postwar period. For governments formed immediately after an election, we confirm the results of past studies that found high levels of congruence and responsiveness. However, extending the analysis to governments formed between elections, the level of government responsiveness appears to diminish over time with each new government. Our findings concerning levels of voter–government congruence are mixed, yet we do find some evidence of declining congruence as well. In sum, since many studies of postwar governments in Western democracies have been based on elections and the resulting governments, our analysis demonstrates the need to include those governments that form between elections.

Assessing the Validity of Enns and Koch’s Measure of State Policy Mood

Enns and Koch (hereafter E&K) use multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) along with survey aggregation to measure state policy mood. As E&K rely on direct information about public opinion, it would be preferable to Berry et al.’s widely used indirect measure relying on data about the issue positions and vote shares of members of Congress, if E&K’s measure were valid. Assessing the validity of E&K’s measure takes on special importance because the measure proves to be nearly uncorrelated with Berry et al.’s measure, implying that at least one is invalid. Because the “true” policy mood of states is unknown, it is impossible to definitively assess the validity of E&K’s measure. Instead, we raise some concerns about E&K’s measurement methodology and present evidence pertaining to the indicator’s face validity, convergent validity, and construct validity. Our analyses leave us doubtful that the E&K measure is valid because its characterization of state moods departs significantly from conventional wisdom and current scholarship.

The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters

Abstract This article provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that Donald Trump distinctively attracted unprecedented levels of support from “low-information voters.” The findings suggest that his campaign exploited a void of facts and reasoning among these voters that made them more vulnerable to relying on emotions about Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, and African-American citizens, as well as their disdain for the first African-American President Barack Obama. As a result, these Trump supporters were less in a position to want or be able to question Trump’s seemingly unprecedented campaign of misstatements, untruths, and lies. The article discusses the implications for US politics in the Trump era and beyond.