Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis study examines the role of car ownership in facilitating employment among recipients under the current
welfare‐to‐work law. Because of a potential problem with simultaneity, the analysis uses predicted
car ownership constructed from two instrumental variables, insurance premiums and population density for car
ownership. The data come from a 1999–2000 survey of TANF recipients in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The empirical results show a significant independent contribution of car ownership on employment. The presence of
an predicted ownership is associated with a 9 percentage point increase in the odds of being employed. Moreover,
the results indicate that lowering insurance premiums by $100 can increase the odds of employment by 4
percentage points. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

This paper examines the role of car access (including but not limited to car ownership) in facilitating employment among recipients under the current welfare-to-work law. In 1996, Congress enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which dramatically altered this nation's social policy. TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) replaced the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program, but the transformation went well beyond renaming the welfare system. Instead of providing an entitlement, the legislation's goals are ending welfare dependency and promoting economic self-sufficiency through employment. New regulations limit cash support, place a time limit on benefits, mandate strong work requirements, and delegate the implementation to the states and local agencies. As a result of these reforms, hundreds of thousands of recipients are entering the labor market, but their ability to find a job remains unanswered. Successful restructuring of the welfare system requires implementing agencies to eliminate as many barriers as possible. Many recipients are severely disadvantaged by limited education and work experience, but the obstacles are not confined just to human-capital deficiencies. Moreover, time limits have shifted strategies from training and schooling to placing individuals in a job as quickly as possible.

Neighborhood governance has emerged as an important arena for voluntary civic engagement, but little is known about how election participation varies across neighborhoods. We examined the election participation of 88 Los Angeles neighborhood councils (NCs) and found much of the variation can be explained by neighborhood demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Consistent with the voting participation literature, NCs with a higher percentage of Hispanic or poor residents had lower participation. Contrary to expectations, NCs with a higher percentage of Asian/Pacific Islander residents or lower educational attainment had higher participation. Interestingly, the presence of nonresidential NC stakeholders, such as business owners, workers, and nonprofit organizations, was not significantly related to participation after controlling for other factors.

For the first time in decades, the 1990s experienced a significant increase in naturalization. The number of naturalized U.S. citizens rose from 6.5 to 11 million citizens by 2002 (Figure 1; Fix, Passel and Sucher, 2003). Chinese Americans in particular experienced a surge in naturalization during the 1990s. From 2002-2004, California had the largest percentage of naturalized persons. Immigrants from Asian countries comprised a significant portion of the total naturalized between 2002 and 2004. Additionally, the San Francisco metropolitan area had the tenth largest naturalization rate from 2002 to 2004 (Rytina and Saeger, 2005). At the same time, legislation and political events targeted immigrants in California, creating a negative political climate for foreign-born residents. This study examines naturalization rates among the Chinese-American population living in San Francisco during 1980-2000. This study compares the characteristics of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who became citizens and those who have yet to become naturalized during this large wave of immigration and subsequent anti-immigrant legislation and sentiment. Previous research has examined Chinese immigrants on a larger scale; however, this study examines a smaller sample to account for differences associated with a specific region. Naturalization is the citizenship mechanism that grants immigrants constitutional rights and benefits as well as political participation in US society. Legal permanent US residents who are 18 years of age or older and have lived in the country for at least five years are eligible to gain citizenship (Rytina and Saeger, 2005). Becoming a citizen is the first benchmark toward immigrant civic participation. The rate of naturalization among Asian Pacific Americans determines the size of the APA population eligible to vote and also its political future as a voting base. In order to study immigrant Chinese voting behavior, it is necessary to first study the likelihood of naturalization among this group. Measuring naturalization rates over time and collecting demographic data aids in tracking the variation in the immigrant voter pool. A regression model is applied to study the influence of certain immigrant characteristics that influence the decision to naturalize. Characteristics such as age, sex, educational attainment, years of residence in the US, English language ability and place of birth have been thought to be strong indicators of naturalization rates among foreign-born populations (Ong and Nakanishi, 1996).

This paper examines the political views and ideology of the 1996 cohort. We constructed a survey from an early 2005 voter registration roll, and details of the survey are available from the author upon request. In the survey we asked Chinese Americans for information about their political ideology and partisan affiliation, and also asked for opinions on a range of public policy issues, many of them specifically related to the Chinese-American community or to public policies dealing with ethnicity and immigration (for example, ethnic preferences in education). We also asked about the nature and sources of political engagement: why the respondents chose to vote and where and from whom they got their political information. We found that Chinese Americans in the Bay Area, like Chinese Americans nationwide, are not ideologically monolithic. They are neither liberal nor conservative, and while many are members of political parties, few report strong feelings of partisan allegiance. The respondents are united, however, in their views on a range of ethnic issues—although, interestingly, they are divided over affirmative action. Overall, we find that the respondents share many of the same concerns as American at large, but that they are more aware of policy issues that deal specifically with Chinese Americans.

This working paper assesses the durability of Chinese-American political participation in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1996 and 2004. We are interested in this durability, which we call "survival," for two reasons. First, because it gives us a better understanding of the universe of the population we are trying to study. Our survey was culled from those members of the 1996 cohort who are on the most recent registration rolls, which means that it contains information on only those members of the 1996 cohort who remained politically active. It is therefore useful for us to learn more about the characteristics of this group, and to determine what characteristics contribute to their continued political action. In particular, we want to know if the continued Chinese-American participation is a specifically ethnic phenomenon; that is, if the durability of the Chinese-American registration is owed to their being Chinese American, rather than to other factors (such as income or age or gender). If the continued Chinese-American registration is ethnic in nature, this would lend credence to our hypothesis that the large surge in political activity in 1996 by Chinese Americans was a defensive reaction, and one that remains influential today. Our second reason for performing this analysis is more academic: the data themselves tell an interesting story about the durability of political involvement. Political scientists have long concerned themselves with patterns of electoral participation, and in efforts to determine why political participation increases for some individuals and declines for others. Thus while our primary purpose in this duration analysis is to better understand this Bay Area Chinese-American population, a secondary benefit is that it yields us a useful experiment that can contribute to the more general literature in political science. We use registration to vote as our proxy for political activity, and the sample is, again, drawn from the 1996 cohort of first-time Chinese-American registers. The 1996 cohort is a useful one to study because, as we have noted in previous sections, 1996 marked a significant upsurge in Chinese-American political activity in the Bay Area, largely as a reaction to anti-immigrant legislation. The 1980s and early 1990s witnessed an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in both American politics at large and California in particular—a number of anti-immigrant measures were either proposed or passed by voters in California. The threat to immigrants posed by these measures prompted a significant increase in naturalization rates and voting on the part of Bay Area Chinese Americans, culminating in a large cohort of Chinese Americans that voted in the national elections of 1996. Naturalization was an understandable and predictable reaction for Chinese Americans. Naturalization not only provided protection against anti-immigrant measures, but also provided a voice with which the newly naturalized could help shape future policies. The durability of Chinese-American political engagement, however, is less easy to predict. Two conflicting dynamics are at work. On the one hand, ethnic mobilization, and particularly defensive mobilization, can be short-lived. Political activity spawned by a particular issue or threat also tends to be transitory; once the threat subsides, levels of political participation can also decay. Evidence also suggests, however, that political activity tends to predict itself—that once the initial foray into politics is made, subsequent involvement becomes easier and more common. In this framework ethnic mobilization, regardless of its root cause, would set in motion a positive cycle that leads to continued involvement. Lastly, of course, we should also include the possibility that the perceived threat has not subsided; if anti-immigrant sentiment remains strong, so too might the political participation of immigrant groups. We should note that Chinese Americans who registered for the first time in 1996 did not necessarily naturalize and register that year. Certainly some of them may have. But the sample may also include Chinese Americans who naturalized earlier but did not become impelled to register until 1996. Either way would represent a significant step toward political activity, and makes 1996 a useful starting point for our study. Anecdotal and descriptive data suggests that Chinese Americans have remained politically active in the Bay Area, and that indeed they have emerged as an important swing voting bloc in municipal elections (Lee, 2003). Chinese Americans have been credited with helping Gavin Newsom win the San Francisco mayoral race in 2004. In this study we use a survey and duration analysis to determine whether Chinese-American voting activity has in fact endured in the ten years since the 1996 cohort. Our results suggest that this is the case; Chinese Americans from the Bay Area cohort remain politically active.