Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTThe Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Public Law #104–193) is perhaps the most visible national legislation since the sweeping Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. For social policy so well entrenched into the American social fabric, the rapidity with which reforms swept through the welfare system was unprecedented and confound conventional theoretical pronouncements on bureaucracy and policy change. The swiftness of reform, and the political rhetoric that surrounded the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, have prompted criticism that reformers responded more to the social construction of welfare recipients than they did to the dictates of sound public policy (Magusson and Dunham, 1996). This article discusses the ramifications of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for battered women and concludes that battered women's social construction as deserving of public assistance, but politically weak, precipitated welfare reform policy, targeted to battered women, that has been largely rhetorical rather than substantive.

THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES THE THEMES OF WELFARE AND FEDERALISM. AT THIS EARLY STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF THE 1996 WELFARE REFORM ACT, THESE THEMES MUST BE STATED AS QUESTIONS RATHER THAN ANSWERS, AS HYPOTHESES NOT CONCLUSIONS. THE ARTICLE DISCUSSES WHAT THE NEW WELFARE POLICY SEEKS TO ACCOMPLISH AND WHAT THE EFFECTS ARE OF ITS LIMITED DEVOLUTION OF POWER TO THE STATES.

In many respects, the United States remains a nation of immigrants. This is the first book length treatment of the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on a wide range of immigrant groups in North America. Contributors to the book draw on ethnographic fieldwork, government data, and original survey research to show how welfare reform has reinforced socio-economic hardships for working poor immigrants. As the essays reveal, reform laws have increased the social isolation of poor immigrant households and discouraged large numbers of qualified immigrants from applying for health and welfare se

This article presents a feminist analysis of the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, which ended women's and children's federal entitlement to welfare. It draws on the congressional hearings preceding the act's passage to argue that the act was crafted to discipline poor women who seemed to challenge traditional gender roles and deep-seated values about women's place in American society.

Putting policy into practice : five years of welfare reform -- Making the transition from welfare to work : successes but continuing concerns -- Family structure and childbearing before and after welfare reform -- Family incomes : rising, falling, or holding steady? -- How are children faring under welfare reform? -- Work opportunities for people leaving welfare -- Child care and TANF reauthorization -- Health insurance, welfare, and work -- The "hard-to-serve" : definitions and implications -- Assessing welfare reform's immigrant provisions -- Race, ethnicity, and welfare reform -- TANF funding and spending across the states

Recent revisions in child support and paternity establishment legislation enacted under the 1996 welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), significantly alter the American welfare state's relationship to men's fathering. Through a critical review of prior research and social service literature, the authors argue that PRWORA actively constructs fatherhood not only through state policies that maintain males as "breadwinners" but also through state-sponsored social service programs that seek to influence men's identities as fathers. PRWORA's policies and their accompanying discourses simultaneously reproduce and undermine gender hierarchy yet tacitly maintain structural race and class inequalities.

Work over Welfare tells the inside story of the legislation that ended ''welfare as we know it.'' As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, author Ron Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996

Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996. This major welfare reform bill explicitly barred legal immigrant eligibility for most federal means‐tested public benefits. This article applies a Foucauldian method of analysis to congressional discourse surrounding legal immigrant exclusion from welfare. Such an approach examines how political issues are constructed to reveal the use of power and discursive rules in the production of socially and politically acceptable truths. I argue that legislators used specific discursive constructions to frame immigrant exclusion provisions. These discursive approaches, often at odds with empirical data, reinforced existing ideology and governed the employable concepts that held power in the debate. The analysis also demonstrates that political discourse implicitly revolved around the "immigrant bargain." Elements of this bargain included the ideal type of immigrant desired by the United States and the proper relationship of the nation to such immigrants.

Eighty‐six requests to the federal government for waivers to existing welfare law, made by forty‐three states between 1992 and 1996, are examined and grouped into twenty distinct types. The political party of the governor in the requesting state is used as the independent variable. Hypotheses are formulated based on received notions of the major parties' orientation toward welfare programs, alleging that Democrats would be more likely than Republicans to maintain or expand existing benefits or to offer new benefits, while Republicans would be more likely than Democrats to reduce their states' responsibilities toward the poor, to impose new behavioral requirements on recipients, and to seek waivers that might result in increased competition for low‐end jobs. The last of these hypotheses proves to be the most robust, while others are rejected entirely. It is concluded that statehouse Democrats may be abandoning the working poor, but their Republican counterparts are sedulously serving the needs of their business constituency.