The politics of child welfare: Are child welfare policies, budgets and functioning a red/blue issue?

Abstract

Child Protective Services (CPS) are a politically contentious area of practice and policy. While this is well known, no attempts have been made to understand differences in state level CPS systems as a function of state political orientation. We explore the bivariate and limited multivariate relationships between state political orientation (governorships, legislature and public voting patterns), CPS funding, the adoption of specific policies (differential response, drug policy, intimate partner violence policy, centralization and mandated reporting), system inputs (referral rate, percentage of reports from mandated sources, report types), and system outputs (percent screened in, percent substantiated and percent placed). We also explore the degree to which other state characteristics (wealth, rurality) are related to these outcomes. We find that political orientation has few associations with any of our dependent measures, and when present, such associations could plausibly related to state income and rurality measures, which did have consistent relationships to CPS functioning. Our approach found little indication that “Red” and “Blue” states differ markedly with regard to their CPS systems, and we include a series of suggestions for future research. We discuss the potential policy and practice implications of our findings.