Journal ArticleDOI
Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession
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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
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Journal ArticleDOI
Inequality, Labor Market Segmentation, and Preferences for Redistribution
James E. Alt,Torben Iversen +1 more
TL;DR: This article formalized and examined two overlapping models that show how rising inequality combined with ethnic and racial heterogeneity can explain why many advanced industrial countries have experienced a drop in support for redistribution as inequality has risen.
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The Electoral Consequences of Two Great Crises
TL;DR: In this article, it was argued that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, rightwing parties were at first more successful than left-wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years.
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The economic resilience of tourism industry in Italy: What the ‘great recession’ data show
Roberto Cellini,Tiziana Cuccia +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the evolution of tourism industry in Italy during the recent years of the so-called "Great Recession" (2008-12), highlighting the most prominent features of the changes that occurred in both the demand and the supply side of the tourism industry, over these years, focusing on the differences across regions, kinds of destination, and categories of accommodation.
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Who wants demanding active labour market policies? : public attitudes towards policies that put pressure on the unemployed
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed individual-and country-level factors that explain public support for demanding active labour market policies in five Western European countries and found that unemployed individuals sympathising with the political right are more strongly opposed to demanding measures than employed individuals with the same political preferences.
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Political Effects of the Great Recession
TL;DR: For example, in 2008, the president's party was punished at the polls for the dismal state of the election-year economy, and the successful challenger, Barack Obama, pushed policy significantly to the Left, as Democratic presidents typically do, provoking a predictable "thermostatic" shift to the Right in the public's policy mood as mentioned in this paper.
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.
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The American Voter
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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.