Date of Award
4-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Patrick Donnay
Abstract
The domestic adoption system throughout the United States has been complex yet crucial in starting millions of families over the years. About 7 million Americans are considered adopted persons, and as many as 100 million Americans have adoption in their immediate families. Though these numbers seem impressive, there are still 130,000 children in the U.S. foster care system waiting to be adopted. Adoptions in the US fall into one of three main categories. The first is adoption of children from the public foster care system, the second is adoption through private adoption agencies or independently, and the final category is that of inter-country adoption of infants and children from other countries. I focus on adoption in the foster care system and agency adoptions. The laws in regards to adopting a child vary quite drastically from state to state. I look into why this is, and what effects these differences have. I accomplish this by incorporating the relevant work on state federalism and state variation in political culture, and then tie these differences to the laws pertaining to adoption in the United States. Findings reveled that states that had an individualistic political culture had different adoption outcomes and laws than those states who reported moralistic and traditionalistic. Moralistic and Traditionalistic states however, were relatively similar in adoption laws and outcomes.
Recommended Citation
Trabing, Erica, "State-to-State Child Adoption Variations: A Political Culture Perspective" (2015). Political Science Theses and Capstones. 96.
https://pines.bemidjistate.edu/capstone-polisci/96
Included in
American Politics Commons, Family Law Commons, Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Social Policy Commons, Social Welfare Commons, Social Welfare Law Commons, State and Local Government Law Commons
