The Color of Welfare Sanctioning: Exploring the Individual and Contextual Roles of Race on TANF Case Closures and Benefit Reductions

Abstract

This article investigates the individual and contextual roles of race on welfare sanctions: benefit cuts for failing to comply with work or other behavioral requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Using six years of federal administrative data, I advance previous welfare research by providing a nationally representative analysis of participant-, county-, and state-level predictors of welfare sanctioning. Using theories of racial classification, racialized social systems, and racial threat as guiding frameworks, I find that black and Latina women are at a greater risk of being sanctioned than white women. Further, although odds of a sanction are slightly reduced for black women living in counties with greater percentages of blacks, the opposite holds for Latinas, who are at an increased risk of being sanctioned in counties with greater percentages of Latinos.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. I would like to thank Karyn A. Loscocco, Lawrence E. Raffalovich, Hayward Derrick Horton, Brian Donovan, William Staples, and three anonymous TSQ reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.

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