Date of Award

5-1-1994

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Political Science & Public Administration

Abstract

In President Reagan's New Federalism, the federal government had a decreased role in the domestic sector and the state and local governments had increased roles with more of the responsibilities. His grants-in-aid policy made the states play a larger leadership role. Reagan was critical of welfare and redistributive services programs. Under Reagan, was the federal government more apt to cut programs that targeted the poor and were the state and local governments less apt to replace the cuts? The point of the research was to determine the impact of the 1981 Reagan budget cuts on city spending for welfare and spending for housing and community development. The hypothesis is that Reagan's budget cuts will impact city spending for welfare more than spending for housing and community development. If political theorists, like Daniel Elazar, were correct, region and political culture would be the most important predictors of city spending on welfare and spending on housing and community development. If political theorists, like Paul Peterson, were correct, the most important predictors of city spending on welfare would be fiscal pressure and dependency on federal revenue. If political scholars, like David Morgan and Robert England, were correct, city population would be an important predictor of city spending for welfare and spending for housing and community development.

Multiple regression analyses were done on a listing of 118 cities, over 10,000 and less than 1,000,000, which spent for both welfare and housing and community development from 1976-87. A comparison of the spending means for 1976-77, 1981-82 and 1986-87 showed that the 1981 Reagan budget cuts impacted welfare more than housing and community development. Only the moralistic and individualistic political cultures were consistently statistically significant at the .05 level with a positive relationship to welfare spending (other variables in the equation controlled) but they explained little of the variation in spending on welfare for 1976-87. Only city dependency on federal revenue was consistently statistically significant at the .05 level with a positive relationship to housing and community development spending (other variables in the equation controlled) but explained little of the variation in spending on housing and community development for 1976-87. Removing the dummy variables for region and political culture had more of an impact on the prediction of spending for welfare than on spending for housing and community development.

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