Local Governments as Implementors of Public Policy

Abstract

This study expands the growing literature in comparative public policy that examines welfare services. By now, it is accepted that a combination of economic, social, and political factors are influential in the delivery of these services by the 60 states. This paper finds that similar factors are also operating at the county level in New York state. Most notably, political factors affect the distribution of welfare benefits-despite federal and state mandates that require distribution to be based solely on need. This raises a number of issues. concerning the nature of political influence and the autonomy of local bureaucracies, which require further exploration. Copyright 1990 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Forecasting welfare caseloads: The case of the Japanese public assistance program

“…[5], and Japan [67]. While most studies examine the effect of unemployment, some explore such economic factors as the industry composition [33,43] and urbanization [16,43,57] of local economies. Furthermore, the impact of personal income is examined by analyzing poverty rates [16,56,57,66] or income quintiles [10,35,40] in addition to the traditional measure of per capita income.…”

“…While most studies examine the effect of unemployment, some explore such economic factors as the industry composition [33,43] and urbanization [16,43,57] of local economies. Furthermore, the impact of personal income is examined by analyzing poverty rates [16,56,57,66] or income quintiles [10,35,40] in addition to the traditional measure of per capita income. Other measures are population proportions of demographic characteristics, such as educational background [10,12,34,35], gender [33,43], single motherhood [5,10,48,52,57,66], age [10,24,52], and race [10,12,33,35,36,46,47,52,57].…”

“…Other measures are population proportions of demographic characteristics, such as educational background [10,12,34,35], gender [33,43], single motherhood [5,10,48,52,57,66], age [10,24,52], and race [10,12,33,35,36,46,47,52,57]. Some researchers have also examined the political orientation of public sector [10,16,35,36,52,62]. Finally, some works focus on the impacts of policy variables such as benefits levels [10, 11, 15, 3436, 40, 4649, 52, 56, 62, 64, 66, 71], minimum wages [15,36,43,52,62], other assistance programs [5,10,15,24,30,34,35,36,46,48,52,…”