Differential coverage across demographic groups in a census or survey can reduce the accuracy and representativeness of the resulting statistics. Researchers traditionally have used community-level measures to study response behavior and coverage, which can obscure patterns for small population groups. We illustrate this using household-level citizenship and immigration status. We construct household-level characteristics using administrative records for each address in a randomized control trial (RCT) survey that measured the effects of including a citizenship question on a decennial census questionnaire. Our results show that the self-response rate to the questionnaire without the citizenship question ranges from 70.4% in households with only U.S.-born non-Hispanic Whites to 27.5% in those with at least one likely undocumented person (a 42.9 percentage point gap). Including the citizenship question widens the gap by a statistically significant 2.4 percentage points. Compared to households with all U.S.-born non-Hispanic Whites, the household roster omission rate in households with at least one likely undocumented member is 6.0 times higher without the citizenship question and 10.4 times higher with the question. These patterns help explain why administrative record-based population data include more non-citizens than survey-based official statistics.
{"title":"Citizenship question effects on household survey response","authors":"J. David Brown, Misty L. Heggeness","doi":"10.1002/pam.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70004","url":null,"abstract":"Differential coverage across demographic groups in a census or survey can reduce the accuracy and representativeness of the resulting statistics. Researchers traditionally have used community-level measures to study response behavior and coverage, which can obscure patterns for small population groups. We illustrate this using household-level citizenship and immigration status. We construct household-level characteristics using administrative records for each address in a randomized control trial (RCT) survey that measured the effects of including a citizenship question on a decennial census questionnaire. Our results show that the self-response rate to the questionnaire without the citizenship question ranges from 70.4% in households with only U.S.-born non-Hispanic Whites to 27.5% in those with at least one likely undocumented person (a 42.9 percentage point gap). Including the citizenship question widens the gap by a statistically significant 2.4 percentage points. Compared to households with all U.S.-born non-Hispanic Whites, the household roster omission rate in households with at least one likely undocumented member is 6.0 times higher without the citizenship question and 10.4 times higher with the question. These patterns help explain why administrative record-based population data include more non-citizens than survey-based official statistics.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143666328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice: A Complexity Approach to Policy by Heather E.Campbell, AdamEckerd, and YushimKim. Springer Cham, 2024, 202 pp., $179.99 (hardcover).","authors":"Shanti Gamper‐Rabindran","doi":"10.1002/pam.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143665841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley. Simon & Schuster, 2024, 256 pp.","authors":"Valeria Umanets","doi":"10.1002/pam.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70008","url":null,"abstract":"Click on the article title to read more.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143635318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A commonly expressed concern about distributional weighting in benefit‐cost analysis is that the informational burden is too high and the practical challenges insurmountable. In this paper, we address this concern by conducting distributional weighting on a number of real‐world examples, covering a range of different types of policy impacts. We uncover and explore a number of methodological issues that arise in the process of distributional weighting and provide a simplified set of steps that we believe can be implemented by practitioners with a wide range of expertise. We conduct sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation to test the robustness of our estimates of weighted net benefits to the various assumptions we make, and find that, in general, distributional weighting is no more vulnerable to modeling assumptions and parameter selection than unweighted benefit‐cost analysis itself. We conclude that the concern about the practicability of distributional weighting is, at least in a range of important cases, unfounded.
{"title":"Practical issues in conducting distributional weighting in benefit‐cost analysis","authors":"Daniel Acland, David Greenberg","doi":"10.1002/pam.22669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22669","url":null,"abstract":"A commonly expressed concern about distributional weighting in benefit‐cost analysis is that the informational burden is too high and the practical challenges insurmountable. In this paper, we address this concern by conducting distributional weighting on a number of real‐world examples, covering a range of different types of policy impacts. We uncover and explore a number of methodological issues that arise in the process of distributional weighting and provide a simplified set of steps that we believe can be implemented by practitioners with a wide range of expertise. We conduct sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation to test the robustness of our estimates of weighted net benefits to the various assumptions we make, and find that, in general, distributional weighting is no more vulnerable to modeling assumptions and parameter selection than unweighted benefit‐cost analysis itself. We conclude that the concern about the practicability of distributional weighting is, at least in a range of important cases, unfounded.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143599962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Frank Edwards has written an exceptional essay focused on reconciling critical and quantitative approaches to understanding the role of historic and contemporary racism as drivers of racial disparities in Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement in the United States. Moreover, he proposes an innovative theoretical framework with explicit empirical applications for estimating the magnitude of the effects of racism in producing these disparities. This approach, which we look forward to seeing implemented in future empirical work, holds considerable promise for increasing our understanding of the extent to which racist processes have resulted in and continue to result in Black and Native American/American Indian populations being disproportionately represented in CPS systems.</p> <p>We commend Edwards on this endeavor and, on the whole, see no major areas of disagreement between his perspective and ours. We fully agree that historical and contemporary racist processes—that is, the pervasive influence of structural racism in U.S. society, including in its social and governmental institutions and their policies and practices—have ultimately resulted in racial disparities in CPS involvement in the United States, that the magnitude of the effect of racism on these disparities has not been estimated, and that estimating its magnitude will contribute to fully contextualizing the etiology, evolution, and persistence of racial disparities in CPS involvement and informing research, policies, and programs to address them. We also concur with Edwards's assessment that two particularly rigorous quantitative studies (Baron et al., <span>2024a, 2024b</span>) have found convincing evidence of caseworker bias <i>within CPS</i>, specifically with respect to foster care placement. We underscore, however, that these findings indicate that caseworkers are more likely to leave White children than Black children in homes in which they are at especially high risk of being abused or neglected. This evidence suggests that, to the extent that foster care placement of children who are at greatest risk of maltreatment in their home serves to protect those children from abuse and neglect—to promote their safety—<i>CPS may be better serving (protecting) Black children than White children</i>.</p> <p>Like that of Edwards, our thinking is “informed by critical race and feminist theories of the welfare state, [which] argue that racial inequalities in CPS exposure are caused by deep structural and institutional processes.” In our view, by limiting the opportunities and resources available to Black and Native American/American Indian populations both throughout our nation's history and in the present, these processes have directly resulted in the social and economic marginalization of these populations. They have also shaped the economic and social contexts in which these populations live, leaving them disproportionately at risk of a wide range of environmental- and individual-
{"title":"Racism and racial disparities in Child Protective Services involvement: How can government respond?","authors":"Lawrence M. Berger, Brenda Jones Harden","doi":"10.1002/pam.22679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22679","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Frank Edwards has written an exceptional essay focused on reconciling critical and quantitative approaches to understanding the role of historic and contemporary racism as drivers of racial disparities in Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement in the United States. Moreover, he proposes an innovative theoretical framework with explicit empirical applications for estimating the magnitude of the effects of racism in producing these disparities. This approach, which we look forward to seeing implemented in future empirical work, holds considerable promise for increasing our understanding of the extent to which racist processes have resulted in and continue to result in Black and Native American/American Indian populations being disproportionately represented in CPS systems.</p>\u0000<p>We commend Edwards on this endeavor and, on the whole, see no major areas of disagreement between his perspective and ours. We fully agree that historical and contemporary racist processes—that is, the pervasive influence of structural racism in U.S. society, including in its social and governmental institutions and their policies and practices—have ultimately resulted in racial disparities in CPS involvement in the United States, that the magnitude of the effect of racism on these disparities has not been estimated, and that estimating its magnitude will contribute to fully contextualizing the etiology, evolution, and persistence of racial disparities in CPS involvement and informing research, policies, and programs to address them. We also concur with Edwards's assessment that two particularly rigorous quantitative studies (Baron et al., <span>2024a, 2024b</span>) have found convincing evidence of caseworker bias <i>within CPS</i>, specifically with respect to foster care placement. We underscore, however, that these findings indicate that caseworkers are more likely to leave White children than Black children in homes in which they are at especially high risk of being abused or neglected. This evidence suggests that, to the extent that foster care placement of children who are at greatest risk of maltreatment in their home serves to protect those children from abuse and neglect—to promote their safety—<i>CPS may be better serving (protecting) Black children than White children</i>.</p>\u0000<p>Like that of Edwards, our thinking is “informed by critical race and feminist theories of the welfare state, [which] argue that racial inequalities in CPS exposure are caused by deep structural and institutional processes.” In our view, by limiting the opportunities and resources available to Black and Native American/American Indian populations both throughout our nation's history and in the present, these processes have directly resulted in the social and economic marginalization of these populations. They have also shaped the economic and social contexts in which these populations live, leaving them disproportionately at risk of a wide range of environmental- and individual-","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143538600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We study how civilian complaint investigators affect officer behavior in Chicago. We exploit quasi-random assignment of complaints to supervising investigators and use variation in whether supervisors tend to acquire sworn affidavits that substantiate the complaints. When the assigned investigator opens more investigations through obtaining affidavits, accused officers accumulate fewer complaints in the first three months of the investigation. We find that, prior to a scandal, assignment to high-investigation supervisors causes officers to make more arrests. However, this reverses after the scandal. Our findings suggest that police watchdogs can improve officer behavior in ordinary oversight environments but may backfire in heightened oversight environments.
{"title":"Strengthening police oversight: The impacts of misconduct investigators on police officer behavior","authors":"Andrew Jordan, Taeho Kim","doi":"10.1002/pam.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70002","url":null,"abstract":"We study how civilian complaint investigators affect officer behavior in Chicago. We exploit quasi-random assignment of complaints to supervising investigators and use variation in whether supervisors tend to acquire sworn affidavits that substantiate the complaints. When the assigned investigator opens more investigations through obtaining affidavits, accused officers accumulate fewer complaints in the first three months of the investigation. We find that, prior to a scandal, assignment to high-investigation supervisors causes officers to make more arrests. However, this reverses after the scandal. Our findings suggest that police watchdogs can improve officer behavior in ordinary oversight environments but may backfire in heightened oversight environments.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143532764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay, I seek to reconcile critical and econometric approaches to diagnosing the causes of deep racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes. Using a series of causal diagrams and critical engagement with the counterfactual causal model, I suggest policy analysts embrace a theoretical framework for quantitative inference that recognizes the complex ways that racism impacts families, places, and policy systems. Common approaches that partition inequalities into risk and bias components normatively imply that some inequalities are legitimate and some illegitimate. As we push toward foundational reform in how policy systems work with children and families, we must embrace analytic approaches that 1) map more convincingly onto real-world processes and 2) take questions of equity and harm as central ethical concerns.
{"title":"Bias, risk, racism: Reconciling critical and quantitative approaches to understanding racial inequality in child welfare system outcomes","authors":"Frank Edwards","doi":"10.1002/pam.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70001","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I seek to reconcile critical and econometric approaches to diagnosing the causes of deep racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes. Using a series of causal diagrams and critical engagement with the counterfactual causal model, I suggest policy analysts embrace a theoretical framework for quantitative inference that recognizes the complex ways that racism impacts families, places, and policy systems. Common approaches that partition inequalities into <i>risk</i> and <i>bias</i> components normatively imply that some inequalities are legitimate and some illegitimate. As we push toward foundational reform in how policy systems work with children and families, we must embrace analytic approaches that 1) map more convincingly onto real-world processes and 2) take questions of equity and harm as central ethical concerns.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143528339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a shared understanding of the causes, consequences, and policy implications of racial disparities in child welfare involvement","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/pam.22675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22675","url":null,"abstract":"Click on the article title to read more.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143528340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<h2> ON RACE AS A CAUSE OF CPS INTERVENTION</h2> <p>Berger and Harden have offered a comprehensive and compelling overview of the state of empirical research on racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes. They show that Black children and families experience CPS intervention across a range of outcomes more frequently than White peers. They suggest four causal pathways that could account for these inequalities: 1) differential surveillance; 2) decision-maker bias within CPS; 3) differential risk of child maltreatment; and 4) structural racism. They suggest that evidence for differential surveillance and within-CPS bias are likely small (or negligible) contributors to Black/White inequalities in child welfare outcomes; instead, current evidence strongly points to differential risk of maltreatment and structural racism as key drivers of differential Black child and family exposure to child welfare systems.</p> <p>While Berger and Harden's set of four causal pathways do adequately capture those proposed in most research literature, this framework misses a subtle vector for how racism impacts the CPS policy process. As I attempt to illustrate in Figure 5 of my first essay, historical and contemporary racism have impacted the policy field itself. The quantity and quality of interventions available to front-line social workers to respond to children and families in crisis are themselves products of racist social processes. The narrow focus on marginal effects of race on CPS outcomes common in econometric analyses implicitly naturalizes these arrangements. From a critical perspective, the common counterfactual question may be more accurately stated as: “within a policy system known to have racist design features and policy goals, and in a context of deep structural inequality, do otherwise comparable Black and White children experience different outcomes?”</p> <p>If we bracket our definition of the concept of racial discrimination to merely the marginal impact of the perception of skin color on a discrete outcome of a policy process we can obtain an answer to this question. However, these approaches reduce the complex social stratification system of race to the perception of phenotypical differences (Kohler-Hausmann, <span>2018</span>), obscuring the structural and institutional causal pathways that produce race as a system of social and family stratification salient for CPS processes (Feely & Bosk, <span>2021</span>). For example, in recent work, Baron and colleagues (<span>2024</span>) found evidence of differential treatment of Black children by CPS agency workers in Michigan but paradoxically argued that evidence points to an “under-protection” of White children compared to Black children through their assessment of the probability of intervention conditional on their measurement of maltreatment risk. While I disagree with their interpretation of this evidence, this finding does present an interesting and useful counterfactual that dese
{"title":"Incorporating a more expansive theory of racism into child and family policy systems","authors":"Frank Edwards","doi":"10.1002/pam.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<h2> ON RACE AS A CAUSE OF CPS INTERVENTION</h2>\u0000<p>Berger and Harden have offered a comprehensive and compelling overview of the state of empirical research on racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes. They show that Black children and families experience CPS intervention across a range of outcomes more frequently than White peers. They suggest four causal pathways that could account for these inequalities: 1) differential surveillance; 2) decision-maker bias within CPS; 3) differential risk of child maltreatment; and 4) structural racism. They suggest that evidence for differential surveillance and within-CPS bias are likely small (or negligible) contributors to Black/White inequalities in child welfare outcomes; instead, current evidence strongly points to differential risk of maltreatment and structural racism as key drivers of differential Black child and family exposure to child welfare systems.</p>\u0000<p>While Berger and Harden's set of four causal pathways do adequately capture those proposed in most research literature, this framework misses a subtle vector for how racism impacts the CPS policy process. As I attempt to illustrate in Figure 5 of my first essay, historical and contemporary racism have impacted the policy field itself. The quantity and quality of interventions available to front-line social workers to respond to children and families in crisis are themselves products of racist social processes. The narrow focus on marginal effects of race on CPS outcomes common in econometric analyses implicitly naturalizes these arrangements. From a critical perspective, the common counterfactual question may be more accurately stated as: “within a policy system known to have racist design features and policy goals, and in a context of deep structural inequality, do otherwise comparable Black and White children experience different outcomes?”</p>\u0000<p>If we bracket our definition of the concept of racial discrimination to merely the marginal impact of the perception of skin color on a discrete outcome of a policy process we can obtain an answer to this question. However, these approaches reduce the complex social stratification system of race to the perception of phenotypical differences (Kohler-Hausmann, <span>2018</span>), obscuring the structural and institutional causal pathways that produce race as a system of social and family stratification salient for CPS processes (Feely & Bosk, <span>2021</span>). For example, in recent work, Baron and colleagues (<span>2024</span>) found evidence of differential treatment of Black children by CPS agency workers in Michigan but paradoxically argued that evidence points to an “under-protection” of White children compared to Black children through their assessment of the probability of intervention conditional on their measurement of maltreatment risk. While I disagree with their interpretation of this evidence, this finding does present an interesting and useful counterfactual that dese","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143528349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Announcements from APPAM","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/pam.22672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22672","url":null,"abstract":"Click on the article title to read more.","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143528401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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