The inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities is often considered an important factor leading to a relatively limited American welfare system. However, given the federal nature of welfare eligibility rules and the states' role in determining benefit levels, few studies explicitly link questions of inclusion and benefit levels when explaining the evolution of American welfare policy. This study examines the relationship between inclusion and benefit levels by analyzing state policies related to the welfare reforms of 1996 which allowed states to decide if recent immigrants would be included in welfare benefits, and subsequently the extent to which this decision affected overall benefit levels offered by states under TANF. The results suggest that states' decisions regarding inclusion subsequently affect benefit levels, with the direction of these relationships most closely reflecting the erosion model's prediction of broader eligibility associated with lower benefit levels.

Despite a substantial increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority lawmakers across the United States, scholars have been unable to demonstrate that diversification of representative bodies increases minority group influence over policy decisions outside of small local governing boards. These null findings, however, are primarily due to underspecified empirical designs that do not account for the conditioning effects of racialized political contexts and majority party coalition membership. Using state-level data on welfare benefit levels and a survey of black state legislators, this study shows that black descriptive representation exerts policy influence outside of local governing bodies, but that a highly racialized political context and party control condition the nature and degree of policy influence.tives. Yet, previous studies neither account for the competing theoretical claims nor utilize samples with the variation in descriptive representation and political context necessary to judge their validity. In short, there are many established theories but no systematic and rigorous tests that evaluate their claims. The purpose of the present study is to fill this empirical void by turning to evidence from black descriptive representation in state legislatures. The study finds that minority representation, formal institutional positions held by minority lawmakers, and coalition membership all operate as mechanisms for influence, yet these mechanisms are conditioned by the racialization of the political context. The next section presents the key theoretical models of influence related to minority descriptive representation and develops hypotheses specific to each model. These hypotheses are then tested with two data sets to examine the influence of African-American state legislators. The first compares models of influence using state-year observations of AFDC cash benefit levels as the dependent variable. The second analysis takes advantage of individual-level data from a survey of black legislators to test the hypotheses with a subjective indicator of black legislative influence. The study then examines the indirect influence black descriptive representation exerts through formal leadership positions to further clarify the role of partisan

How does minority racial and ethnic descriptive representation exert policy influence in majoritarian representative institutions? And how do nonrepresentative majoritarian institutions, such as the citizen initiative, affect the degree of this influence? I use an event history analysis of state adoption of English Only laws from 1984 to 2002 to test a model of minority policy influence that is exerted through the possession of state legislative leadership positions. Unlike previous studies, I find that the size of the minority population and the level of descriptive representation in the legislature exert only an indirect effect on legislative policy decisions. Furthermore, the majoritarian rules of the initiative undermine the policy influence minorities gain through legislative leadership and can actually lead to a policy backlash.

We use state legislator ideology estimates (standardized W‐nominate values) to examine whether Latino and African American legislator ideological differences can be explained away by traditional constituency characteristics like partisanship and demographics. We find instead that both Black and Latino legislators are unique “types.” Our evidence supports the theoretical presumption that there is a minority dimension to legislative voting and that it is uniquely personified by minority officeholders. White, Black, Latino, Democrat, and Republican representatives are all examined for responsiveness to different partisan and racial/ethnic populations. The dataset includes all 50 state legislatures from the 1999–2000 legislative sessions, including information from the U.S. Census, NALEO, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Gerald Wright's Representation in the American Legislature Project, and CQ Press's Almanac of State Legislative Elections.