The Formative Years, Economic Hardship, and Beliefs about the Government’s Role in Lessening Poverty

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Existing research on beliefs about government efforts to lessen poverty is limited in two important ways. First, explanations of beliefs about antipoverty efforts largely focus on current contexts. By emphasizing contemporary contexts, existing research overlooks the potentially profound effect of past experiences. Second, most existing research relies on cross-sectional data, which limits understandings of within person change. In the research presented here, I use both cross-sectional and panel data from the General Social Survey to (1) examine how past experiences shape an individual’s belief about what the government should do about poverty, and (2) examine whether beliefs about the government’s role in helping the poor are sensitive to changes in micro and macroeconomic hardship. Drawing on theories related to the formative years and event-driven changes, I find that experiences during late adolescence, increases in macro-level economic hardship, and increases in individual hardship all influence support for government efforts to lessen poverty; however, current objective and subjective economic position is particularly important. Moreover, I find variation in support across different types of government responses to poverty. In particular, “welfare” is uniquely unpopular, and support for welfare is less responsive to generational experiences or changes in individual-level hardship.