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

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.