Journal ArticleDOI
Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession
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TLDR
This paper found that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending, and this effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats.Abstract:
To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters’ preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a person's ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a “ceiling effect.” However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals’ employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters’ social policy preferences.read more
Citations
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Are better health outcomes related to social expenditure
Jennifer Rubin,Jirka Taylor,Joachim Krapels,Alex Sutherland,Melissa Francisca Felician,Jodi L. Liu,Lois M. Davis,Charlene Rohr +7 more
BookDOI
Are better health outcomes related to social expenditure?: A cross-national empirical analysis of social expenditure and population health measures
Jennifer Rubin,Jirka Taylor,Joachim Krapels,Alex Sutherland,Melissa Francisca Felician,Jodi L. Liu,Lois M. Davis,Charlene Rohr +7 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors have shown that social spending is associated with better health outcomes in OECD countries, by widening the scope of the analysis, by incorporating other societal factors such as social capital and income inequality, and by assessing these relationships not only at the cross-national level but also at the state level within the United States.
Dissertation
Exploring the “Paradox” of Local Social Welfare Spending: Modeling Variations in Responsiveness to Municipal-Level Ideology
Abstract: Local government spending on social welfare activities, such as public health and hospitals, public welfare, education subsidies, and affordable housing, often is characterized in the scholarly literature as “paradoxical,” as it departs from the predictions of the seminal perspective on the financial activities of local governments, the economically based theory of public choice. The theory claims that the prospect of resident mobility should act as a constraint on the “redistribution” of revenue from affluent taxpayers to the needy, who consume more in public services than they pay in taxes. According to public choice, affluent residents should leave cities and towns when they do not benefit from the taxes they pay, specifically, when local governments use tax funds to provide services to other, less-advantaged residents. However, the empirics of local social welfare activity depart from the model’s predictions in two important ways: firstly, local governments do offer social welfare services, spending $193.1 billion in 2007, the focal year of this analysis, on public health, welfare, and housing and community development alone, which may indicate public support for such efforts rather than the unitary opposition posited in the public choice view. Secondly, though public choice depicts municipalities as the sole providers of local services, local governance is more fragmented in actuality: municipal governments, county governments, special-purpose districts, and school districts all may provide services in a given city or town, including social welfare programs. Due to these two phenomena, explanations of the local social welfare role remain incomplete. To explore the possibility that public preferences might explain the existence of local social welfare spending and to allow for variations in the scope of local service provision, two unique contributions to the literature, I employ both newly available measures of city-level ideology tabulated by political scientists Chris Tausanovich and Christopher Warshaw and data on the combined expenditures of all local governments that serve the residents of 112 U.S. cities compiled by researchers at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In preliminary (“baseline”) linear regression models, I find that local governments that serve more liberal residents spend more on social welfare than do more conservative communities. However, the results of expanded regression models, which control for a greater number of demographic covariates, are less definitive, potentially indicating that local expenditures may be affected not only by local resident ideology but by state and federal influences when higher levels of government provide cities and towns with social welfare aid. The local social welfare role clearly is more complex than the parsimonious public choice theory can explain, necessitating future research on a larger sample of communities and theoretical perspectives that extend beyond economic models to examine how resident preferences, variations in the scope of local governance, and the division of responsibility between federal, state, and local governments interact to shape local policy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Just sick of it? Health and political trust in Western Europe
Mikko Mattila,Lauri Rapeli +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored two theoretical possibilities for why personal health may affect political trust: the psychological-democratic contract theory, and the role of personal experience in opinion formation, and found that people with health impairments are more likely to experience the direct effects of political decisions as they are more dependent on public health services.
Journal ArticleDOI
Negativity Bias: The Impact of Framing of Immigration on Welfare State Support in Germany, Sweden and the UK
Sabina Avdagic,Lee Savage +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that negative framing of immigration has a strong and pervasive effect on support for welfare, and this effect is further amplified for people who hold anti-immigrant and anti-welfare attitudes or feel economically insecure.
References
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Book
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
TL;DR: Zaller as discussed by the authors developed a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences, and applied this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate and presidential elections.
Journal ArticleDOI
The American Voter
Journal ArticleDOI
International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the prevailing view of international economic regimes is strictly positivistic in its epistemological orientation and stresses the distribution of material power capabilities in its explanatory logic.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
TL;DR: The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992) as discussed by the authors is a model of mass opinion formation that offers readers an introduction to the prevailing theory of opinion formation.