Acceso usuarios
Mark H. Harvey
The 1996 welfare reform act devolved authority over ‘workfare’ to the states andallowed them to further devolve control to local and regional entities, yet little is knownabout how such ‘second-order’ devolution affected implementation and outcomes. Thisarticle applies urban regime theory and the comparative case study method to analyzethe impacts of the ‘paradigmatically neoliberal’ model of second-order devolutionimplemented in Texas. Pursuing a labor market-based approach, Texas devolvedauthority for workfare to regional — i.e. multi-county — Workforce Investment Boards(WIBs) directed, in theory, by private sector employers. The findings indicate, however,that the WIBs functioned as patronage-oriented ‘employment regimes’ dominatedby local elected officials and ‘machine-politics community based organizations’. Theoutcome was a socially and spatially regressive transfer of federal resources from needyfamilies in the most distressed counties to regime actors and organizations in morepolitically-institutionally powerful counties. This left families in the politically weak casestudy counties subject to the state’s diversionary ‘workfirst’ program without accessto crucially necessary childcare and transportation assistance. The study extends ourunderstanding of how neoliberal workfare exacerbates inequality at the sub-state levelthrough a regionally constituted form of political-institutional exclusion.
