The Rise and Fall of Court Prerogatives in Paternity Establishment

Abstract

Much of the policy analysis literature takes the institutional structure in which a program operates?bureaucratic agencies or the courts?as given. Policy inputs proceed through the "black boxes" of institutions to produce a given set of outcomes. In this model, insti tutions are merely the channels by which policy goals are measured by either qualitative or quantitative impacts on a target population. What is missing from that paradigm, however, is the recognition that the mediating institutions themselves are the result of a particular constellation of determining forces and that these forces can have very real consequences on individuals' lives. One increasingly contentious area of debate surrounding institutional choice is paternity establishment in child support cases. Paternity establishment is a fundamental component of effective child support collection, especially as the number of out-of-wed lock births has risen from 400,000, or 10 percent of all births, in 1970 to 1.3 million, or 33 percent of all births, in 1999.1 The central question is, where should it be conducted, in the state courts or in the state administrative agencies that run the child support pro gram? Most recently, the states have answered that paternity establishment should take place under the direction of the variety of administrative agencies that run the country's child support programs. These agencies run the gamut from public welfare agencies in most states to attorney general offices and departments of revenue in others. These child support agencies, in turn, also supervise paternity establishment procedures in numerous local units, such as hospitals and town halls. This choice represents a dramatic break with past practices of deciding all such cases in the court system. How has such a mon umental change in public policy taken place? What factors mobilized such a change, and what does the current system look like? In describing this process of institutional evolution, the first section of this analysis will present the ways in which paternity cases were routinely determined under the state