Does Government Support Respond to Governments’ Social Welfare Rhetoric or their Spending? An Analysis of Government Support in Britain, Spain and the United States

Luca Bernardi,James Adams

doi:10.1017/s0007123417000199

Abstract

Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.

Highlights

At the same time, issue ownership theory posits that parties use rhetoric to direct citizens’ attention towards issues the party “owns,” in the sense that the party has developed a long-term reputation for competently handling these issues
The percentages displayed in columns 2-3 of Table 1 indicate that, as expected, left-wing governments devoted higher proportions of their executive speeches and budgets to social welfare domains than did right-wing governments: the mean value of the [govt. welfare speech (t – 1)] variable is 15.4% for left-wing governments versus 10.3% for right-wing governments, while the mean of the [govt. welfare spending (t – 1)] variable is 18.4% for left-wing governments but 16.8% for right-wing governments
The empirical question is: Do citizens prioritize actors’ concrete behaviour over their rhetoric? We address the latter question here, in the context of the mass public’s evaluations of the government’s social welfare rhetoric and spending

Summary

Introduction

Issue ownership theory posits that parties use rhetoric to direct citizens’ attention towards issues the party “owns,” in the sense that the party has developed a long-term reputation for competently handling these issues. Welfare spending (t)] variable denotes that increases in social welfare spending in the current year (compared to the previous year) are associated with increased government support, a short-term effect, while a positive coefficient β4 on the [govt.

Results

Conclusion