The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare

Abstract

We explore the impact of prosocial orientations on a domain of American public opinion that has puzzled many-attitudes toward social welfare policies. We focus on the orientation of humanitarianism, i.e., a sense of obligation to help those in need, and find that this value can explain support for a wide variety of social welfare policies. We argue that humanitarianism is an important element of the American sociopolitical ethos, although it has received little attention in the public opinion literature. We contrast humanitarianism with egalitarianism and show that these dispositions lead people to support distinctive sets of policies that constitute different types of welfare state. While egalitarianism causes people to embrace policies that mandate an extensive economic role for the government, humanitarianism is associated with more modest policies that seek to address the problems of the needy. Support for these more modest policies has generally been much greater in the United States than support for more invasive policies that seek to tinker with the free market. Thus, we argue that humanitarianism provides a better explanation for public opinion toward welfare in the United States than egalitarianism. We discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion research. p ublic support for social welfare programs in the United States has never been easy to understand. On the one hand, Americans are deeply suspicious of an expansive government and strongly committed to the principles of economic self-reliance and laissez-faire capitalism, factors that erode support for a welfare state (Free and Cantril 1968; McClosky and Zaller 1984). On the other hand, public opinion surveys have generally registered considerable support for specific social welfare programs (Cook and Barrett 1992; Free and Cantril 1968, Kluegel and Smith 1986; McClosky and Zaller 1984; Shapiro and Young 1989), even on the eve of the extensive welfare reform of 1996 (Weaver, Shapiro, and Jacobs 1995). We explore here the question of why there is public support for social welfare programs despite Americans' deep misgivings about the idea of welfare. We answer this question through an analysis of Americans' sociopolitical values and their relationship to support for a wide variety of social welfare programs.' Value-based approaches to understanding welfare policy support are not new (Bobo 1991; Feldman 1988; Kluegel and Smith 1986; McClosky and Zaller 1984), but we depart from the past research by