Listening to Snitches: Race/Ethnicity, English Proficiency, and Access to State Agencies’ Enforcement Systems

• In Event: 2463 - Sociology of Law

Abstract

How does the state respond to members of the public seeking to mobilize its coercive power? Focusing on dedicated welfare fraud control units in the United States, we examine how ethnicity and English proficiency affect individuals’ access to these units’ systems for public reporting of welfare fraud suspicions. Using interviews with fraud investigators and a correspondence audit of these fraud reporting systems, we assess how likely fraud control authorities are to express interest in reports that come from people who are ostensibly Latina or ostensibly white, and from people with ostensibly higher or lower degrees of English proficiency. Our experiment demonstrates that fraud units do respond differently to different reports. When white reporters make English errors, fraud units are less likely to take up their reports; errors’ uptake-dampening effect, however, does not hold for Latina reporters. The qualitative evidence from our interviews reveals determinations of investigative promise as the force underlying these uptake disparities. Fraud investigators are incentivized to prioritize cases they believe are likely to lead to substantiated charges. For white reporters, English errors cue gatekeepers’ preexisting skepticism about public reporters’ reliability, decreasing enthusiasm for investing resources in these reports. Particularly because immigration status is rule-relevant, however, reports from Latina reporters containing English errors offer special viability appeal, erasing the negative influence on uptake probability that errors demonstrate for white reporters. Our results shed new light on contemporary racial/ethnic dynamics in the US welfare system, and advance social scientific understanding of why some people—and not others—become consequential contributors to the exercise of coercive state power.

Authors

• Spencer Headworth, Purdue University

• Viridiana Rios, Purdue University