The Causes and Consequences of America’s Diverging Welfare States

• In Event: Social Class and Representation

Abstract

Growing income inequality, declining economic mobility, and less financial stability describe the United States economy in recent decades. While a limited group of people benefit from the current economic structure, many Americans experience multiple challenges like low wages, rising debt, food insecurity, and poor health outcomes. As a number of scholars have documented, these issues have gone largely unaddressed by the federal government even as a host of policy solutions are widely popular among the public. At the same time, many state governments have attempted to confront these increasingly visible socio-economic issues through the welfare state and other economic policies. For example, increases in the minimum wage, allowing workers to collectively bargain, Medicaid expansion, and supportive unemployment insurance programs are all state policies that have been used to grapple with some of the issues mentioned above. Of course, a number of states have not adopted any of these or similar policy solutions. The result of this current political landscape is an increasingly fragmented welfare state and economic system, where the benefits available depend on the state one lives in. In this study, we seek to better understand two related questions. First, why are some states actively seeking to address the economic problems faced by Americans, by building off existing programs or innovating with new programs while others are not? Second, how much do these policy differences influence socio-economic outcomes and public well-being in the states? In regard to the first question, several recent studies have found that party competition and party control of government have both led to policy divergence in the states. We expand on this research by showing how several important factors that overlap with the partisan make-up of the states strongly shape policy outcomes. Then, we develop a state socioeconomic well-being index that allows us to assess the extent to which these diverging welfare states lead to different outcomes for the residents of these states. Our research provides a clearer picture of why U.S. welfare states are increasingly diverging and what the consequences of this are for public well-being.

Authors

• William W. Franko, West Virginia University

• Christopher M. Witko, Pennsylvania State University