Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession

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....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 2013-02, Vol.107 (1), p.80-103
Main Author: MARGALIT, YOTAM
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitude surveys
Attitudes
Economic conditions
Economic Crises
Economic crisis
Economic Recession
Employment
Evidence
Expenditures
Family Income
Finance
Government Role
Great Recession
Ideology
Job loss
Labor
Labor Market
Layoffs
Longitudinal studies
Markets
Political Attitudes
Political Parties
Political partisanship
Political science
Politics
Polls & surveys
Preferences
Public assistance programs
Recessions
Research Design
Self interest
Social Policy
Spending
Unemployment
Voter attitudes
Voter behavior
Voters
Voting
Welfare
Welfare economics
Welfare Policy
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055412000603