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Analyzes how differences in state government public welfare programs affect outcomes following federal passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).

With an ever-expanding stream of solid waste, and limited possibilities for disposal, communities increasingly have to make difficult decisions about where to store these by-products of daily living. The authors use survey data from seven counties in Florida that have recently dealt with solid waste location decisions to assess the extent to which citizen attitudes reflect a NIMBY perspective to these facilities. Contrary to what the NIMBY phenomena predicts, respondents who lived closer to existing or proposed facilities were not more likely to perceive them as dangerous as those living further away. In addition, the respondents were able to list problems and benefits to support their perceptions of danger posed by these facilities. These findings suggest that citizens do not always respond to environmental risks by gut reaction or without information as is sometimes suggested in the NIMBY literature.

Scholars are rediscovering the social context of politics and governing, including race, trust, and, if recent elections are a guide, America's "culture wars." Social capital that network of social relations and the accompanying norms of trust and reciprocity is very much to the point of those dynamics. Evidence from the first round of welfare reform in the late 1990s is used to explore the relationship between elements of social capital, race and state welfare policy choices. The evidence from the welfare case suggests that one element of social capital, generalized trust, often has an independent effect on welfare policies. States with higher levels of trust are more likely to adopt welfare policies that rely on "carrots" rather than "sticks" to move individuals off welfare and into jobs. At the same time the evidence makes it clear that the influence of trust is very much conditioned by racial considerations, most notably the racial composition of welfare caseloads.