State Legislators' Knowledge About Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy

Social Policy and Administration · 2026-03-15

ABSTRACT How much knowledge do policymakers have about poverty, inequality, and social policy and does that knowledge matter? This study analyzes innovative data from direct (e.g., face‐to‐face) interviews of 49 California and Texas state legislators. Knowledge is assessed comprehensively with 11 questions and compared against a nationally representative sample of adults. Legislators answered only 42.5% of questions correctly—statistically significantly, but only slightly higher than the general public's 30.9% correct. Less than a tenth of legislators knew the poverty rate, and less than a quarter knew what share of the poor are homeless or the top 5% income threshold. There is also substantial heterogeneity as few answered most questions correctly, but several answered almost all incorrectly, and 14 of 49 performed worse than the general public. We demonstrate that this knowledge is salient because it strongly predicts legislators' voting. We then show key legislative roles, affiliations with stakeholders, and educational or biographical backgrounds do not result in greater knowledge. While legislators report various information sources influencing their thinking in this domain, some cannot cite any source, and sources are unrelated to knowledge. Ultimately, this study demonstrates policymakers' knowledge about poverty, inequality, and social policy is both limited and consequential.

Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty, by GoyalNikhil. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023. 334 pp. $29.99 cloth. ISBN: 9781250850065.

Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2025-03-01

How Does Culture Matter for Attainment, and How Would We Know If It Did?

American Sociological Review · 2025-07-05 · 1 citations

In their 2022 ASR article, Horwitz, Matheny, Laryea, and Schnabel (HMLS 2022) argue that religious subculture significantly shapes educational stratification, emphasizing how Jewish subcultures, especially for young women, foster an education-enhancing “habitus and self-concept.” While commending their aim to identify “clear explanatory mechanisms” and avoid essentialist explanations, this Comment critiques HMLS’s methodology and conclusions, addressing the broader question: Can parental cultural socialization explain group-level differences in educational attainment? We identify four issues: mismeasurement of Jewish parentage, insufficient controls for social class, and two gaps in specifying and operationalizing cultural mechanisms. Re-analyzing the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR), we show that HMLS’s findings remain stable after correcting Jewish parentage mismeasurement but shift substantially when better adjusting for social class. We argue that cultural explanations must meet two additional principles—portability and convertibility—to avoid lapsing into essentialism or reproducing “culture of poverty” narratives. These principles require that (a) social and cultural mechanisms function independently of group membership and be transferable across actors and fields, and (b) structural advantages and barriers are acknowledged and integrated. This Comment thus extends existing guidelines for analyzing the role of culture in stratification and offers a framework for identifying non-essentialist mechanisms driving group differences in attainment.

From Dominance to Parity

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2025-11-05

At the time Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as the 39th president of the United States, the Democratic Party had been enjoying a half-century of sustained electoral advantage. It had long controlled Congress and dominated measures of party identification. When Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, 40% of Americans called themselves Democrats and another 12% told survey takers they leaned towards the party. To win the election of 1976, Carter just needed to hold the voters that started out on his side. Nearly fifty years later, American politics has inverted itself. Close electoral competition is the norm, and politics are at a stalemate. Brady and Parker call the existing deadlock the era of party parity, an age of division unseen since the late-nineteenth century. This book explains this profound shift in electoral politics. Drawing on fresh datasets and long-running surveys, the authors trace the decline of the Democratic majority and consider how this decline differed from past realignments. They show why modern American presidential elections are always close and argue that the rise of Donald Trump largely reinforced preexisting trends. Their work represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on party identification and realignment.

Studying Members of the United States Congress

2025-05-01 · 1 citations

The United States Congress is fundamentally different from contemporary European legislatures; as a consequence, the questions political scientists have asked about it and the methods they have used to study it are also different. The governmental structure specified by the United States Constitution, particularly the separation of powers between legislature and executive, and the relatively weak party system have resulted in Congress maintaining for itself an important decision-making role in the policy process independent of the Executive. While the British Parliament, for example, participates in the policy process by scrutinizing and legitimating government proposals, it does not participate in decision-making. The executive, not Parliament, makes public policy (Norton, 1981, pp. 3-9). The United States Congress, in contrast, takes a real and independent part in decision-making on public policy. Furthermore, not only can the Congress kill or alter the president’s policy proposals, it can and does initiate as well. Thus, the United States Congress is uniquely powerful and independent for a modern legislature.

The necessity of construct and external validity for deductive causal inference

Journal of Causal Inference · 2025-01-01 · 9 citations

Abstract The Credibility Revolution advances internally valid research designs intended to identify causal effects from quantitative data. The ensuing emphasis on internal validity, however, has enabled a neglect of construct and external validity. We show that ignoring construct and external validity within identification strategies undermines the Credibility Revolution’s own goal of understanding causality deductively. Without assumptions regarding construct validity, one cannot accurately label the cause or outcome. Without assumptions regarding external validity, one cannot label the conditions enabling the cause to have an effect. If any of the assumptions regarding internal, construct, and external validity are missing, the claim is not deductively supported. The critical role of theoretical and substantive knowledge in deductive causal inference is illuminated by making such assumptions explicit. This article critically reviews approaches to identification in causal inference while developing a framework called causal specification . Causal specification augments existing identification strategies to enable and justify deductive, generalized claims about causes and effects. In the process, we review a variety of developments in the philosophy of science and causality and interdisciplinary social science methodology.

The Heterogeneities of Immigrant Poverty in the U.S.

2025-06-03

Immigrants are now more than one-fifth of the poor in the U.S. Yet, despite some valuable literature, immigrant poverty remains arguably understudied. This study builds on the larger literatures on immigrant attainment and poverty, and the smaller literature on immigrant poverty. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we provide an improved descriptive demographic portrait of immigrant poverty from 1993-2023, across 51 states (including D.C.), and within 2019-2024 (N=760,026). There is considerable heterogeneity over time. After declining for several decades, immigrant poverty increased substantially in recent years. Immigrant poverty also varies enormously across states. States’ immigrant poverty rates are moderately negatively correlated with states’ immigrant share of the population and strongly positively correlated with states’ non-immigrant poverty. There are large heterogeneities by nation of origin as well. While immigrants from India have among the lowest poverty of any group in the U.S., Honduran immigrant poverty is 6-7 times higher. While especially being a non-citizen immigrant increases poverty, heterogeneities in immigrant poverty are driven more by the major risks of poverty than the immigrant characteristics of being a citizen, years of residence, or mixed status households. That said, heterogeneities by nation of origin are explained by varying mixes of risks, immigrant characteristics and educational selectivity. Ultimately, we demonstrate immigrant poverty is not one coherent phenomenon. Indeed, the heterogeneities within immigrant poverty are perhaps even more important than the heterogeneities in poverty between immigrants and non-immigrants. (Stone Center Working Paper Series)

The Mediating Role of Intergenerational Stratification in the Long Arm of Childhood Income

Demography · 2025-05-22

We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate whether and how intergenerational income stratification mediates the long arm of childhood income for mature adult health. Using three different mediation techniques, we analyze prospective high-quality data on childhood income (ages 0-17) and six health outcomes (ages 40-67): self-rated health, psychological distress, heart attack, stroke, and life-threatening and non-life-threatening chronic conditions. We focus on the mediating role of adult income (ages 30-39). For comparison, we also analyze several alternative potential mediators, including education, health behaviors, and occupation. The results show that adult income is a critical mediator in the long arm of childhood income, mediating almost all the relationship for self-rated health and psychological distress, roughly one half of the relationship for heart attack and stroke, and roughly one third of the relationship for life-threatening chronic conditions. The models also confirm that childhood income has a significant mediated or indirect relationship with health outcomes. Further analyses provide evidence that adult income plays a greater mediating role than the alternative potential mediators. Altogether, the evidence supports intergenerational income stratification as a key mediating process within the long arm of childhood income.

The Demography of Conservative and Liberal Populism in the US

2025-01-01

The Heterogeneities of Immigrant Poverty in the U.S.

Population Research and Policy Review · 2025-06-20 · 1 citations

Abstract Immigrants are now more than one-fifth of the poor in the U.S. Yet, despite some valuable literature, immigrant poverty remains arguably understudied. This study builds on the larger literatures on immigrant attainment and poverty, and the smaller literature on immigrant poverty. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we provide an improved descriptive demographic portrait of immigrant poverty from 1993 to 2023, across 51 states (including D.C.), and within 2019–2023 ( N = 760,026). There is considerable heterogeneity over time. After declining for several decades, immigrant poverty increased substantially in recent years. Immigrant poverty also varies enormously across states. States’ immigrant poverty rates are moderately negatively correlated with states’ immigrant share of the population and strongly positively correlated with states’ non-immigrant poverty. There are large heterogeneities by nation of origin as well. While immigrants from India have among the lowest poverty of any group in the U.S., Honduran immigrant poverty is 6–7 times higher. While especially being a non-citizen immigrant increases poverty, heterogeneities in immigrant poverty are driven more by the major risks of poverty than the immigrant characteristics of being a citizen, years of residence, or mixed status households. That said, heterogeneities by nation of origin are explained by varying mixes of risks, immigrant characteristics and educational selectivity. Ultimately, we demonstrate immigrant poverty is not one coherent phenomenon. Indeed, the heterogeneities within immigrant poverty are perhaps even more important than the heterogeneities in poverty between immigrants and non-immigrants.