Child Support: Policy making in the Contemporary United States

子女抚养费：当代美国的政策制定

• 批准号: 8822352
• 负责人: Ann Orloff
• 金额: $ 10.08万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1989
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1989-07-01 至 1993-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8822352&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Child; Support; Policy; making; Contemporary

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.

在过去的二十年里，关于美国公共和私人儿童抚养系统的几项重要改革一直在争论，其中一些改革成功实施，特别是在州一级。这些改革在父母之间以及父母与政府之间分担养育子女的成本和收益的方式上产生了显著的变化。通过提高收集系统的有效性，儿童抚养系统的改革试图将部分费用从母亲和政府转移到父亲身上。一些州也在试验一项公共担保的儿童抚养费。但为什么有些州在子女抚养方面采取了创新措施，而其他州却没有？如何解释各州在子女抚养政策上的差异？本项目通过对四个州的比较分析来解决这两个问题，这四个州是子女抚养领域的主要创新者：加利福尼亚州、纽约州、德克萨斯州和威斯康星州。这一分析将通过与尚未进行儿童抚养改革的几个州的比较加以补充。这两组比较都将以福利国家研究中得出的假设为基础。对联邦儿童抚养政策发展的考虑将有助于了解州改革举措发生的背景。本研究将对创新和四个州在创新前沿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，从而有助于我们对福利政策的理解，这是社会科学分析的一个领域，正在引起新的注意。考虑到越来越多的只有母亲的家庭和对社会政策的学术兴趣，这个项目应该提供对公民和社会科学家都感兴趣的子女抚养政策的见解。