Marginalization or Incorporation? Welfare Receipt and Political Participation among Young Adults

Abstract

Abstract Prior scholarship finds that participation in means-tested welfare programs, including cash assistance and food stamps, deters political participation among groups that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized. We revisit these findings within a contemporary context using nationally representative data, along with fixed-effects models that adjust for time-stable unobserved and time-varying observed characteristics. In contrast to prior research, we find little evidence that cash assistance is related to participation. However, food stamps—a benefits program that has undergone substantial changes in recent years—is positively associated with being registered to vote. Moreover, food stamps has countervailing associations with voting—e.g., marginalizing and incorporating—that depend on a person’s attention to politics. Together, these findings revise our understanding of how welfare influences political inequalities and advances policy feedback scholarship by identifying heterogeneity by political attentiveness as a focus of future inquiry.