Experimenting with Welfare Reform: Emulating Success, Cutting Costs, or Racing to the Bottom?

This article calls upon the social scientific research community to systematically assess policy devolution within American federalism through the lens of welfare reform. It asks specifically whether the benefits of policy devolution in this area—the opportunity to learn from policy experiments in similar states and the ability to tailor policies to individual state circumstances—outweigh the costs of devolution—possible racial biases across the states, incentives for cutting costs, and fears of a race to the bottom in benefits and eligibility criteria. A scientific research agenda for addressing these issues is developed. The contribution of De Jong et al. (2006) is assessed in terms of its advancement of this agenda. A path toward future contributions to this agenda is suggested.