Values or Views of Government? Analyzing the Ideological Sources of Public Policy Preferences

Abstract

Since the Great Society programs of the 1960s, several researchers have reported that while Americans tend to resist an activist conception of the federal government, they nevertheless give high levels of support to some social programs. In the research literature, the subsequent distinction betweenpolicy-specific valuesandgeneral views of governmentraises an important but as yet unanswered question: Which of these two factors has a greater impact on support for governmental action within specific policy domains? Answering this question is necessary to advancing social–scientific knowledge about the causal mechanisms shaping public policy preferences, and the current study develops a systematic analysis using data from two national surveys and from a new state-level survey. Results from analyses using ordered logit models show that while general views of government affect people's willingness to endorse governmental action, the extent to which they value the specific goals of governmental action has a much greater impact within specific policy domains, and this appears to be a stable feature of United States public opinion since the 1970s. Additional analyses reveal that while general views of government shape preferences for spending on health, social security, and other types of social welfare, they are only minimally related to spending preferences in policy domains that do not relate to the welfare state. The relevance of these findings for understanding the nature of policy preferences and some of the sources of public support for attempts to reduce the size and responsibilities of the federal government are discussed.