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especially cities such as Baltimore in Maryland.
Conclusion
This paper began with an examination of the influence that national actions, especially
the national welfare reform legislation passed in 1996, had on state welfare reform efforts. I then
described the tremendous difference in the approaches that each state used to comply with the
new national welfare legislation. Tables One and Two demonstrate that the states were varied in
the amount of time they took to develop their new welfare plans and in the design of those plans.
It is important to remember that the great variety in state approaches to welfare reform was not
completely disclosed by the tallies presented in Table Two. Rather, a thorough description of
some of the choices states made on each option was needed to fully appreciate the diversity
among the states. This suggests that comparative studies need to be supplemented with detailed
case studies of the individual states.
The description of the variety of state approaches to welfare reform also led me to ask
the questions: Why did states make such different decisions with regards to welfare reform? Are
there any patterns in the actions taken by states to help answer the last question? To answer
these questions I conducted separate logistic regression analyses on four of the policy
components presented in Table Two. The independent variables I used in these analyses were
chosen to reflect a variety of the environmental influences such as institutional, political, and
economic. Five major findings from these analyses were reported in the paper. First, each
dependent variable, which represented different components of welfare policy, was significantly
related to different independent variables. This finding supports my argument that policy is
made piecemeal, and that each component decision individuals make is influenced by different
environmental factors and has its own zone of choice. Second, certain component decisions
Convention