Strategic stances and programme performance: assessing outcomes of the US states’ delivery of the child support enforcement programme

Since being added as an amendment to the Social Security Act of 1975, the US child support enforcement (CSE) programme has provided services to both Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and non-TANF families under the name of reducing expenditures on welfare programmes and securing children’s rights to be protected by their parents. The federal government mandates that states collect five performance measures in the CSE programme: (1) paternity establishment, (2) support order establishment, (3) current collection, (4) arrearage collection, and (5) cost-effectiveness. Implementing federal programmes does not give states full discretion, but there exists room for states to exercise discretion in developing their own strategies to effectively deliver services and improve performance. In this paper, using Miles and Snow’s strategic dimensions (1978) and Boyne and Walker’s later studies (2004), states’ strategic stances are categorized into Analyser, Prospector, and Defender, and the effects of states’ strategic stance and their internal implementation factors on the CSE performance are examined using models estimated with ordinary least square (OLS) regression and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). The strategy classification is widely studied in private organizations, but it has relevance to current public organizations that seek to achieve improvement in performance. The results of the cross-sectional OLS and SUR models suggest that states having an Analyser stance have a positive relationship to two performance indicators (arrearage collection and Cost-Effectiveness) of the CSE programme, and states with Prospector and Defender stances are particularly significant in predicting high paternity establishment in the CSE programme, but no other performance indicator. Past performance is one of the strongest predictors of all five-performance indicators of the CSE programme. State internal implementation factors show mixed impacts in terms of significance and direction on the performance indicators of all the five models.