Sarah K Bruch
Biographic Data
| ID | 207933 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah K Bruch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah K |
| FAMILY NAME | Bruch |
| SIGNATURE | BRUCH S K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4071-9971 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 293 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Fifty Worlds of Welfare: State Discretion and Social Citizenship Since 1994
The efficacy of social citizenship is determined by the generosity and the inclusiveness of assistance, and by the terms under which such assistance is offered. In the United States, social policies have historically been characterized by deference to private markets, categorical tiers of eligibility, and marked variation across local and state jurisdictions. In this article, we describe and characterize the reconfiguration of American social pro…
Poverty Disparities and the Reconfiguration of Social Provisioning: White, Black, and Latino Single-Mother Families, 1996–2018
Changes in US social provisioning from 1996 to 2018 profoundly affected the well-being of single-mother families, with notable consequences for racial inequalities in poverty alleviation. Using an institutional approach to racial disparities alongside a sequence-independent decomposition analysis, we group policies and programs into five redistributive mechanisms—federal transfers, state transfers, federal income taxes, state income taxes, and fe…
Unsecured Credit and the Social Safety Net in U.S. States
Low-income households in the United States draw on public and private resources to manage economic risk. Cross-national scholars describe a “credit–welfare state tradeoff” where credit markets become particularly important when state benefits are less supportive. The United States is frequently highlighted in this regard, with its often-inadequate market-first safety net. Both credit markets and the safety net are, however, highly unequal and seg…
Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States
The efficacy of the US antipoverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: federal taxes and federal transfers (centralized) and state taxes and state transfers (decentralized). Using the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Sup…
Home inequity: Race, wealth, and housing in St. Louis since 1940
The persistence and severity of the gap between black and white wealth, and the role of housing discrimination in creating and sustaining this gap are both well documented. But given the chronological and spatial limits of national data sets, we have little direct empirical evidence about the local mechanisms shaping race, housing and wealth in the era when most of the damage was done. We employ the newly available 1940 full count census and the …
Unequal Positions: A Relational Approach to Racial Inequality Trends in the US States, 1940–2010
Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. …
Politics, State discretion and retrenchment in safety net provision: Evidence from the USA in the post-Welfare Reform era
The welfare reforms of the late 1990s in the US granted States increased and varying levels of discretion in programme financing, rulemaking and administration. Scholars have generally assumed that this discretion would lead to retrenchment. We use comparable measures of programme generosity and inclusion from 1994–2014 to examine the relationship between levels of discretion, State political factors and the likelihood of retrenchment. In our des…
The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality in Safety Net Provision in the Post–Welfare Reform Era
Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we examine cross-state inequality in social safety net provision from 1994 to 2014. We ask whether programs that are more decentralized in terms of policy design are more variable across states in terms of the generosity of benefits and inclusiveness of receipt and…
Schooling as a Formative Political Experience: Authority Relations and the Education of Citizens
How does formal education matter for inequalities of political behavior across the citizenry? Most answers to this question focus on the things that schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and resources. By contrast, we draw on policy feedback research to resuscitate a more “Deweyian” appreciation for schools as sites where citizens have their earliest formative experiences with public authority and learn what it means to participate in a ru…
Threat in Context: School Moderation of the Impact of Social Identity Threat on Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gaps
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
From Policy to Polity: Democracy, Paternalism, and the Incorporation of Disadvantaged Citizens
This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of "policy feedback" investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstanding questions related to selection bias, the distinction between universal and targeted programs, and th…
Unanticipated Educational Consequences of a Positive Parent-Child Relationship
If today there exists a single transcendent idea about the family-school connection, it is that a positive parent-child relationship improves children's chances of succeeding in school. However, using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (N = 5,836), we demonstrate that, although positive parent-child relations are associated with better academic achievement in high school, they also are associated with an increased desire to …
Estimating the “Impact” of Out-of-Home Placement on Child Well-Being: Approaching the Problem of Selection Bias
This study used data on 2,453 children aged 4–17 from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being and 5 analytic methods that adjust for selection factors to estimate the impact of out-of-home placement on children’s cognitive skills and behavior problems. Methods included ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and residualized change, simple change, difference-in-difference, and fixed effects models. Models were estimated using the …
From Policy to Polity: Democracy, Paternalism, and the Incorporation of Disadvantaged Citizens
This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of "policy feedback" investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstanding questions related to selection bias, the distinction between universal and targeted programs, and th…
Schooling as a Formative Political Experience: Authority Relations and the Education of Citizens
How does formal education matter for inequalities of political behavior across the citizenry? Most answers to this question focus on the things that schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and resources. By contrast, we draw on policy feedback research to resuscitate a more “Deweyian” appreciation for schools as sites where citizens have their earliest formative experiences with public authority and learn what it means to participate in a ru…
The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality in Safety Net Provision in the Post–Welfare Reform Era
Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we examine cross-state inequality in social safety net provision from 1994 to 2014. We ask whether programs that are more decentralized in terms of policy design are more variable across states in terms of the generosity of benefits and inclusiveness of receipt and…
Threat in Context: School Moderation of the Impact of Social Identity Threat on Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gaps
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
Unanticipated Educational Consequences of a Positive Parent-Child Relationship
If today there exists a single transcendent idea about the family-school connection, it is that a positive parent-child relationship improves children's chances of succeeding in school. However, using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (N = 5,836), we demonstrate that, although positive parent-child relations are associated with better academic achievement in high school, they also are associated with an increased desire to …
Unequal Positions: A Relational Approach to Racial Inequality Trends in the US States, 1940–2010
Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. …
Politics, State discretion and retrenchment in safety net provision: Evidence from the USA in the post-Welfare Reform era
The welfare reforms of the late 1990s in the US granted States increased and varying levels of discretion in programme financing, rulemaking and administration. Scholars have generally assumed that this discretion would lead to retrenchment. We use comparable measures of programme generosity and inclusion from 1994–2014 to examine the relationship between levels of discretion, State political factors and the likelihood of retrenchment. In our des…
Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States
The efficacy of the US antipoverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: federal taxes and federal transfers (centralized) and state taxes and state transfers (decentralized). Using the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Sup…
Estimating the “Impact” of Out-of-Home Placement on Child Well-Being: Approaching the Problem of Selection Bias
This study used data on 2,453 children aged 4–17 from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being and 5 analytic methods that adjust for selection factors to estimate the impact of out-of-home placement on children’s cognitive skills and behavior problems. Methods included ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and residualized change, simple change, difference-in-difference, and fixed effects models. Models were estimated using the …
From Policy to Polity: Democracy, Paternalism, and the Incorporation of Disadvantaged Citizens
This article investigates how experiences with public policies affect levels of civic and political engagement among the poor. Studies of "policy feedback" investigate policies not just as political outcomes, but also as factors that set political forces in motion and shape political agency. To advance this literature, we take up three outstanding questions related to selection bias, the distinction between universal and targeted programs, and th…
Unanticipated Educational Consequences of a Positive Parent-Child Relationship
If today there exists a single transcendent idea about the family-school connection, it is that a positive parent-child relationship improves children's chances of succeeding in school. However, using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (N = 5,836), we demonstrate that, although positive parent-child relations are associated with better academic achievement in high school, they also are associated with an increased desire to …
Threat in Context: School Moderation of the Impact of Social Identity Threat on Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gaps
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
Politics, State discretion and retrenchment in safety net provision: Evidence from the USA in the post-Welfare Reform era
The welfare reforms of the late 1990s in the US granted States increased and varying levels of discretion in programme financing, rulemaking and administration. Scholars have generally assumed that this discretion would lead to retrenchment. We use comparable measures of programme generosity and inclusion from 1994–2014 to examine the relationship between levels of discretion, State political factors and the likelihood of retrenchment. In our des…
The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality in Safety Net Provision in the Post–Welfare Reform Era
Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we examine cross-state inequality in social safety net provision from 1994 to 2014. We ask whether programs that are more decentralized in terms of policy design are more variable across states in terms of the generosity of benefits and inclusiveness of receipt and…
Schooling as a Formative Political Experience: Authority Relations and the Education of Citizens
How does formal education matter for inequalities of political behavior across the citizenry? Most answers to this question focus on the things that schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and resources. By contrast, we draw on policy feedback research to resuscitate a more “Deweyian” appreciation for schools as sites where citizens have their earliest formative experiences with public authority and learn what it means to participate in a ru…
Unequal Positions: A Relational Approach to Racial Inequality Trends in the US States, 1940–2010
Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. …
Home inequity: Race, wealth, and housing in St. Louis since 1940
The persistence and severity of the gap between black and white wealth, and the role of housing discrimination in creating and sustaining this gap are both well documented. But given the chronological and spatial limits of national data sets, we have little direct empirical evidence about the local mechanisms shaping race, housing and wealth in the era when most of the damage was done. We employ the newly available 1940 full count census and the …
Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States
The efficacy of the US antipoverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: federal taxes and federal transfers (centralized) and state taxes and state transfers (decentralized). Using the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Sup…
Fifty Worlds of Welfare: State Discretion and Social Citizenship Since 1994
The efficacy of social citizenship is determined by the generosity and the inclusiveness of assistance, and by the terms under which such assistance is offered. In the United States, social policies have historically been characterized by deference to private markets, categorical tiers of eligibility, and marked variation across local and state jurisdictions. In this article, we describe and characterize the reconfiguration of American social pro…
Poverty Disparities and the Reconfiguration of Social Provisioning: White, Black, and Latino Single-Mother Families, 1996–2018
Changes in US social provisioning from 1996 to 2018 profoundly affected the well-being of single-mother families, with notable consequences for racial inequalities in poverty alleviation. Using an institutional approach to racial disparities alongside a sequence-independent decomposition analysis, we group policies and programs into five redistributive mechanisms—federal transfers, state transfers, federal income taxes, state income taxes, and fe…
Unsecured Credit and the Social Safety Net in U.S. States
Low-income households in the United States draw on public and private resources to manage economic risk. Cross-national scholars describe a “credit–welfare state tradeoff” where credit markets become particularly important when state benefits are less supportive. The United States is frequently highlighted in this regard, with its often-inadequate market-first safety net. Both credit markets and the safety net are, however, highly unequal and seg…
Sociology (8 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (5 works) · Inequality (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)