The political voices of women, people of color, and low-income people have long been under-represented in the American political system. A growing body of literature suggests that this under-representation may lead to vast disparities in government responsiveness, and that this unresponsiveness may lead to policies that serve, in turn, to widen social and economic inequalities. Perhaps in response to this unequal representation, there has been an explosion in the number of advocacy organizations representing marginalized groups over the past thirty years, just as inequality has widened.
The existing evidence is clear that the poor are far less politically engaged than are more affluent Americans. Data recently reported by the Census Bureau vividly illustrates this relationship: individuals with a family income of $25,000 or less were half as likely to vote in the last election as those with an income of more than $75,000. When education is the measure of socioeconomic status, only 38% of those with less than a high school education voted compared to 75% of those with a bachelor’s degree or greater.
Where you live has a profound effect on your life chances. Among other things, it shapes the school your child attends, accessibility and availability of employment options, the type and attractiveness of housing stock, exposure to local crime, and the quality of public services. Economic and racial segregation makes the distribution of these opportunities highly unequal; less affluent Americans and racial minorities are disproportionately clustered in areas that rate poorly across all of these potential outcomes, and they lack the resources to move to more advantaged communities.
Books
Fighting for Reliable Evidence
About This Book
“Truth-seeking social policymakers and serious students of social policy and social policy research will read and reread this book. Fighting for Reliable Evidence does not provide a permanent truth but it describes a forty-five year quest to understand what works and what does not work.”
—PAUL O’NEILL, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
“Fighting for Reliable Evidence is a fascinating review of the development of the commitment to use randomized experiments for learning about the effectiveness of current and proposed social welfare programs. It is written from two necessary perspectives: that of a pioneering government official striving to institutionalize experiments, and that of an innovator committed to developing an organization able to implement high-quality experiments. Between them, Judy Gueron and Howard Rolston demonstrate how feasible and useful experiments can be and have been. The history they tell is riveting, and the lessons they draw are compelling. No one else from inside the community of random assignment pioneers could have told it better. One day historians of science will use different assumptions to tell their version of the history of random assignment in the social sciences. But until then, this accessibly written book is THE history.”
—THOMAS D. COOK, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair of Ethics and Justice and Professor of Sociology, Psychology, and Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Once primarily used in medical clinical trials, random assignment experimentation is now accepted among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique has been used in social experiments to evaluate a variety of programs, from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. How did randomized experiments move beyond medicine and into the social sciences, and can they be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems? Fighting for Reliable Evidence provides an absorbing historical account of the characters and controversies that have propelled the wider use of random assignment in social policy research over the past forty years.
Drawing from their extensive experience evaluating welfare reform programs, noted scholar practitioners Judith M. Gueron and Howard Rolston portray randomized experiments as a vital research tool to assess the impact of social policy. In a random assignment experiment, participants are sorted into either a treatment group that participates in a particular program, or a control group that does not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any subsequent differences between the groups can be attributed to the influence of the program or policy. The theory is elegant and persuasive, but many scholars worry that such an experiment is too difficult or expensive to implement in the real world. Can a control group be truly insulated from the treatment policy? Would staffers comply with the random allocation of participants? Would the findings matter?
Fighting for Reliable Evidence recounts the experiments that helped answer these questions, starting with the income maintenance experiments and the Supported Work project in the 1960s and 1970s. Gueron and Rolston argue that a crucial turning point came during the 1980s, when Congress allowed states to experiment with welfare programs and foundations, states, and the federal government funded larger randomized trials to assess the impact of these reforms. As they trace these historical shifts, Gueron and Rolston discuss the ways that strategies for resolving theoretical and practical problems were developed, and they highlight the strict conditions required to execute a randomized experiment successfully. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of the potential and limitations of social experiments to advance empirical knowledge.
Weaving history, data analysis and personal experience, Fighting for Reliable Evidence offers valuable lessons for researchers, policymakers, funders, and informed citizens interested in isolating the effect of policy initiatives. It is an essential primer on welfare policy, causal inference, and experimental designs.
JUDITH M. GUERON is scholar in residence and President Emerita at MDRC.
HOWARD ROLSTON is principal associate at Abt Associates.
Related Events & Media
RSF Journal
View Book Series
Sign Up For Our Mailing List
Apply For Funding
Books
Beyond Discrimination
Racial Inequality in a Postracist Era
About This Book
“America in the twenty-first century displays historic racial progress, severe persisting racial inequalities, and novel racial transformations all at once. Too many American political leaders and citizens prefer to think only about the first of these. In this volume a stellar interdisciplinary collection of scholars provides insights into all three topics that deserve the attention of all concerned with the nation’s present and future.”
—Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania
Nearly a half century after the civil rights movement, racial inequality remains a defining feature of American life. Along a wide range of social and economic dimensions, African Americans consistently lag behind whites. This troubling divide has persisted even as many of the obvious barriers to equality, such as state-sanctioned segregation and overt racial hostility, have markedly declined. How then can we explain the stubborn persistence of racial inequality? In Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era, a diverse group of scholars provides a more precise understanding of when and how racial inequality can occur without its most common antecedents, prejudice and discrimination.
Beyond Discrimination focuses on the often hidden political, economic and historical mechanisms that now sustain the black-white divide in America. The first set of chapters examines the historical legacies that have shaped contemporary race relations. Desmond King reviews the civil rights movement to pinpoint why racial inequality became an especially salient issue in American politics. He argues that while the civil rights protests led the federal government to enforce certain political rights, such as the right to vote, addressing racial inequities in housing, education, and income never became a national priority. The volume then considers the impact of racial attitudes in American society and institutions. Phillip Goff outlines promising new collaborations between police departments and social scientists that will improve the measurement of racial bias in policing. The book finally focuses on the structural processes that perpetuate racial inequality. Devin Fergus discusses an obscure set of tax and insurance policies that, without being overtly racially drawn, penalizes residents of minority neighborhoods and imposes an economic handicap on poor blacks and Latinos. Naa Oyo Kwate shows how apparently neutral and apolitical market forces concentrate fast food and alcohol advertising in minority urban neighborhoods to the detriment of the health of the community.
As it addresses the most pressing arenas of racial inequality, from education and employment to criminal justice and health, Beyond Discrimination exposes the unequal consequences of the ordinary workings of American society. It offers promising pathways for future research on the growing complexity of race relations in the United States.
FREDRICK C. HARRIS is professor of political science and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and of the Center on African-American Politics and Society at Columbia University.
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN is professor of political science and provost at The Johns Hopkins University.
CONTRIBUTORS: Anthony S. Chen, Richard P. Eibach, Devin Fergus, Philip Atiba Goff, Rodney E. Hero, Desmond King, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Morris E. Levy, Devah Pager, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Benjamin Radcliff, Lisa M. Stulberg, Dorian T. Warren, Vesla M. Weaver.
RSF Journal
View Book Series
Sign Up For Our Mailing List
Apply For Funding
An estimated nine million US residents live in “mixed-status” households that include at least one unauthorized adult and one or more US-born children. These children are in a unique political position: they enjoy the rights of US citizenship but they are also confronted with the legal exclusion of their parents. How does political socialization work when the parents themselves do not enjoy basic civil and political rights and are subject to deportation? Do the children of the undocumented take advantage of their rights as citizens?
The U.S. Latino population has grown substantially in recent years, with Latinos now comprising the largest ethnic group in the country. Given the increasing politicization of this growing segment of the U.S. population, researchers and policy analysts are devoting a considerable amount of attention to questions concerning public opinion, participation, and representation within the Latino community.