The Diffusion of Federal Social Policy Mandates: The Case of CAPTA, 1974
January 31, 2014 marked the 40th anniversary for the Child Abuse and Protection Act (CAPTA) of 1974 (P.L. 93-247). Seeking in part, to standardize the child maltreatment policy across the US, the original implementation of CAPTA laid out ten criteria that states must meet in order to maintain eligibility for federal funding under the act. In addition to the criteria, there is an implicit requirement that states make use of the definition of child maltreatment provided in the law. Despite the implication, a review of legislative histories of the 50 states and the District of Columbia suggests that states may have varied in the extent and timing of adoption of the CAPTA definition.
Studies of policy process tend to focus on innovation and the voluntary adoption of regulations or legislation as opposed to the mandates imposed by CAPTA. Nonetheless, this literature can serve as a potential framework through which we can generate sensible research questions about the implementation of CAPTA. In line with policy innovation literature (e.g. Berry and Berry, 1990), we would expect both regional and internal influences to play a role in a state's propensity to implement CAPTA. Guided by this literature, we identified two main research questions:
- Does implementation by neighboring states drive the implementation of geographically proximal states?
- Do chronologically older states tend to exhibit variance in their propensity to implement?
Methods
An event-history analysis was conducted of the first statutory changes to a state’s child maltreatment definition laws after the passage of CAPTA. A comprehensive review of statutes from all 50 states and the District of Columbia was completed using LexisNexis Academic and HeinOnline databases. Dates of the earliest statutes were recorded and analyzed by fitting a proportional hazards model using Therneau’s (2014) survival package in the statistical programming language, R. We specifically tested the effects of a state’s year of statehood, the modification of statutes by nearby states, and various control variables on the timing of first legislative changes.
Results
The results indicate a median time of two years post-CAPTA, to the first statutory changes to maltreatment laws, with 36 states making definitional changes by 1976 and 48 making definitional changes by 1980. Available data indicates that legislative activity related to maltreatment definitions has increased over the past 40 years with most states making approximately one change every three years. The results of our analysis indicate significant effects for implementation by geographically proximal states (HR=0.14, p<0.001). No significant effect was found for state age (HR=0.99, p>0.05).
Conclusions and Implications
The analysis presented here seeks to specifically explain how states varied in their legislative implementation after CAPTA. More generally, the results presented here can increase our understanding of how policy-makers can expect federal social policy mandates to disperse in the US. Our analysis suggests that states are adopting a "wait-and-see" approach when implementing ambiguous policy mandates, which is contrary to the standard innovation model of policy process literature. Factors influencing variability throughout the life of legislation will also be discussed.