Policy Design, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Public Management: The Case of Child Support Enforcement

Recently, scholars have focused on policy design flaws as the cause of policy failure rather than on the failure of bureaucrats to follow the dictates of elected officials. The policy design literature suggests that policy coherence and context, the nature of target populations, and the tractability of the policy problem predict a policy's successful enforcement. Alternate hypotheses argue that the local-level implementation environment and the resources that the government commits to implementation have an impact on enforcement levels. To test these hypotheses, child support enforcement is modeled in a pooled time series analysis. We find that policy makers' understanding of the policy problem and the legislative context of the statute influence whether statutes are successful. In addition, enforcement is a function of committed resources to implementation; bureaucratic values; and local variation in the need for services, in fiscal incentives, in client characteristics, and in party competition. The findings reveal some of the flaws in the policy design theories that cause difficulties in empirical tests.