Child Support: Policy making in the Contemporary United States

在过去的二十年里，关于美国公共和私人子女抚养费制度的几项重要改革一直在辩论中，其中一些改革已经成功实施，特别是在州一级。这些改革在父母之间以及父母和政府之间分担育儿成本和收益的方式上产生了显着的不同。通过提高收缴制度的有效性，儿童支助制度的改革力求将部分费用从母亲和政府转移到父亲身上。一些州也在试验公开保证的子女抚养费福利。但为什么一些州在儿童抚养费方面采取创新，而另一些州则没有呢？如何解释各州儿童抚养费政策性质的差异？该项目通过对加州、纽约州、德克萨斯州和威斯康星州这四个在儿童抚养费领域处于关键创新者之列的州进行比较分析，解决了这两个问题。这一分析将通过与几个没有进行子女抚养费改革的州进行比较来补充。这两组比较都将以福利国家研究中的假设为基础。对联邦儿童支助政策发展的审议将有助于了解州改革倡议的背景。这项研究将对创新做出解释，并对创新前沿的四个州的具体政策内容进行解释。它还将通过探索性别与社会政策之间的关系，帮助我们理解福利政策，这是一个正在引起新关注的社会科学分析领域。考虑到越来越多的独身母亲家庭和学术界对社会政策的兴趣，这个项目应该会提供公民和社会科学家都感兴趣的关于子女支持政策的见解。

Over the past two decades, several important reforms of America's public and private child support systems have been debated, and some successfully implemented, particularly at the state level. These reforms make a striking difference in the ways the costs and benefits of child-rearing are shared between parents and between parents and governments. By increasing the effectiveness of collection systems, the reforms in the child support systems seek to partially shift costs from mothers and governments to fathers. Some states are also experimenting with a publicly-assured child support benefit. But why do some states adopt innovations in child support and not others? What explains differences in the character of child support policy across states? This project addresses these two issues through a comparative analysis of four states that have been among the key innovators in the child support area: California, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin. This analysis will be supplemented by comparisons with several states where child support reform has not occurred. Both sets of comparisons will be structured by hypotheses drawn from studies of the welfare state. A consideration of federal child support policy developments will provide an understanding of the context within which state reform initiatives take place. This study will offer an explanation for innovation and the specific policy content of the four states on the cutting edge of innovation. It will also contribute to our understanding of welfare policy, by exploring the relationship between gender and social policy, an area of social-scientific analysis which is attracting new attention. Given the growing numbers of mother-only families and the scholarly interest in social policy, this project should offer insights about child support policy of interest to citizens and social scientists alike.