Social Welfare Attitudes Research Articles

The effects of social class on social welfare attitudes A mediating role of fairness perceptions——Evidence from two welfare states and China

Social welfare attitudes are often considered to be the individual's perceptions of government-dominated welfare provision behavior, which are generally considered to be influenced by self-interest and ideology. International comparative analysis of welfare attitudes has long been lacking in developing countries. Using EVS/WVS 2017–2021 dataset, this study includes China with Germany, the United States in a comparative analysis framework to explore whether there are welfare regimes differences in the impact of self-interest and ideological factors on welfare attitudes. Through testing the impact of social class and egalitarianism on welfare attitudes, this study concluded that both of them are supported in Germany, the United States and China. People's perceptions of self-perceived social class and fairness are two significant variables correlated with attitudes toward social welfare. The perceptions of fairness played a mediating role between self-interest and welfare attitudes, which are strongest in the United States and weakest in China. Through measuring the uniqueness of social welfare attitudes in a country with a large social welfare scale like China in an international comparative framework, this study proposes that international comparative studies ofwelfare attitudes should gradually develop a broad research perspective that encompasses developing countries.

Family support as a working style in child protection in Italy: A comparative study on social workers' child welfare attitudes

AbstractComparative studies on child protection decision‐making highlight the implications and determinants of differences in child welfare systems internationally and reinforce discussions regarding child protection practices and family support when a child is exposed to inadequate parental care. To date, Italian child protection studies have highlighted a system characterised by a strong degree of variability related to the absence of practices shared nationally. Differently, this comparative study focuses more on similarities within the Italian context, seeking to understand how they influence practices. The opinions of 188 Italian social workers with respect to the substantiation of maltreatment, risk assessment and intervention recommendations were compared with the results of a recent study involving practitioners in Israel, Northern Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands. The main outcomes show that Italian social workers prefer a family support orientation, meaning that children are usually removed from their home only if necessary and generally with the aim of reunification with their families. The study also reveals that Italian professionals are more in favour of residential care than foster care.

Does the immigration issue divide the left’s attitudes towards social welfare? A study on public support of social benefits and services in the Nordic countries

PurposeThe paper presents a study on whether citizens’ immigration attitudes shape their attitudes towards social welfare in three Nordic countries.Design/methodology/approachThe main analysis was performed using linear regression analysis. Data were retrieved from the eighth round of the European Social Survey (2016). The data cover the Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish respondents (N = 5,021).FindingsThe analyses indicate that citizens’ immigration attitudes are associated with their social welfare attitudes. The more positive the attitudes towards immigration are, the more positive the attitudes toward social welfare will be. Further, people in the political Left have more positive attitudes towards social welfare compared to those in the political Right; but, the immigration issue is more divisive of the political Left’s opinion than that of the Right.Research limitations/implicationsPublic opinion research has its limitations because behind an individual’s opinion there are many hidden factors. An individual may also have different opinions depending on the dimensions of the welfare state.Social implicationsIf the immigration issue reduces the support for social welfare among the political Left, it may reduce the legitimacy of the Nordic social policy because the support of the political Left has traditionally been in favour of the universal principles of the welfare state.Originality/valueThe association of the immigration issue and social welfare attitudes has been broadly studied; but, the interaction of the immigration issue and political opinion on social welfare attitudes is less studied.

Minding the Black Gender Gap: Gender Differences in Public Opinion among Black Americans

There is little research examining the gender gap in public opinion among Americans of African descent. Amid emerging evidence that Black men are more conservative than Black women, there is reason to believe there may be gender differences in their policy preferences. We use the 1980-2016 cumulative ANES data to observe when racial and gender considerations will be more salient for Black women in determining their policy preferences. We find no gender gap on race-based policies suggesting racial group interests may be driving similar support among Black men and women. We do find gender differences on women’s issues and social welfare policies. We attribute Black women’s support for women’s issues to their gendered interests and demonstrate the gap in social welfare attitudes is mediated by their lower economic status relative to Black men. Despite these differences, we discover that Black men and women support race-oriented and social welfare policies more than either white men or women.

Social Welfare Attitudes and Immigrants as a Target Population: Experimental Evidence

What makes some Americans assume that social welfare programs will benefit immigrants rather than native-born Americans? How do these assumptions shape their attitudes about policy? Recent observational research has shown that immigration attitudes and social welfare attitudes are strongly correlated, but we lack evidence of exactly how this relationship works. In this pre-registered survey experiment, I study respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries of a generic social welfare policy, and test the effects of different “threat” primes on the assumption that the policy benefits immigrants rather than native-born Americans. I find that a prime constructing immigrants as a fiscal threat increases the likelihood that a respondent will make this assumption, while a prime emphasizing cultural or demographic threat has no significant effect. These effects vary by geographic context, but not by relevant attitudes. Attitudes about immigration become an important predictor of policy approval when this assumption is triggered.

European Regional Welfare Attitudes: a Sub-National Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Public attitudes to welfare are key issues in social policy research and practice given their important roles in shaping demands for different types of welfare policies as well as the political parameters within which those welfare decisions are made by governments. Research into headline trends has shown important hardenings in public attitudes to welfare cross-nationally. However, more detailed geographical analysis of these patterns of welfare attitudes sub-nationally remains an important and surprisingly neglected area of understanding, in part due to the lack of suitable survey datasets with which to create sufficiently reliable direct sub-national comparative estimates. Responding to these gaps, this article employs small area estimation techniques to present reliable sub-national estimates and analyses of distinct economic, moral and social welfare attitudes across European regions for the first time in the literature. Compared to previous national analyses the richer spatial understanding enabled in these original analyses reveals previously neglected variation in welfare attitudes within as well as across national boundaries. Five geodemographic ‘families’ of regional welfare attitudes are found across Europe’s regions – from strong welfare supporters to consistent welfare sceptics – with their regional memberships cutting across national boundaries and current welfare typologies.

Sorting the Left from the Rest: The Communitarian Religious Perspective and Liberal Economic Attitudes

In this article, the argument is made that the religious activity generated by churches, which tends to focus an individual's attention either outward toward the larger community or inward toward one's self, can influence parishioners’ economic attitudes. Using survey data obtained during the 2008 presidential election cycle, this article tests the merits of that argument by examining the effect of multiple aspects of religion on economic attitudes. Evidence indicates that, along with some of the conventional religiosity measures, there is a previously noticed but understudied “communitarian” dimension of religion that explains variation in social welfare attitudes. Additional tests conducted on subsamples of denominational groups reveal that the communitarian religious perspective is a significant predictor of liberal welfare attitudes among Mainline Protestants. These findings shed light on characteristics associated with the “religious left,” and provide a clearer picture of how religion, in different measurable forms, is related to economic attitudes.Related Articles Rugeley, Cynthia R., and John David Gerlach. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 444‐470. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00352.x/full Butz, Adam M., and Jason E. Kehrberg. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 256‐286. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12115/full Ertas, Nevbahar. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 426‐451. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12120/abstract Related Media . n.d. “The Henry Institute National Survey of Religion and Public Life, 2008.” http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/NSRPL.asp . 2017. Calvin College. Home Page. https://calvin.edu/centers-institutes/henry-institute/

Race, Religion, and Anti‐Poverty Policy Attitudes

Using the 2008 National Politics Study, the present study indicates that while African Americans are more likely than whites to hear sermons about poverty and other political issues, hearing such sermons more consistently associates with support for anti‐poverty government programs among non‐Hispanic whites than among both African Americans and Hispanics. The racially/ethnically marginalized status of blacks and Hispanics may contribute to these groups being more receptive than whites to religious messages emphasizing social inequality. The contrasting racial experiences of dominance and marginalization may also help explain why hearing politicized sermons is more meaningful to the progressive social welfare attitudes of whites than to African Americans and Hispanics. This expectation is rooted in the heightened variability of perspectives among whites and their religious organizations regarding the government's role in aiding the economically disadvantaged. Conversely, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics support the government helping individuals who fallen upon hard times. The greater variability in opinion among whites may also allow for greater differences in opinion to emerge between whites who attend relative to those outside of religious congregations led by clergy emphasizing spiritual and political solidarity with the poor than is the case for African Americans and Hispanics.

Do Finnish young people support the Nordic welfare state?

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine young people’s attitudes toward social welfare and their perceptions of who is responsible for providing social welfare benefits.Design/methodology/approach– Social welfare attitudes were examined related to three themes: government responsibility, trust in society, and individual responsibility. A sample of 725 students from 12 high and vocational schools in south Finland was used for analysis.Findings– The data suggest that young people have a high regard for the importance of the government’s role as a social support and a mechanism of social welfare for all citizens. In addition, the results show that women highlight government responsibility more than men, and that men highlight the individual’s own responsibility for social issues. According to the results, there is a weak relationship between cultural values and social welfare attitudes. Collective values relate positively to an emphasis on trust in government and government responsibility for social problems, and relate negatively to an emphasis on individuals’ personal responsibility.Originality/value– The study shows that the main principles of the welfare state are still accepted by the Finnish youth, although recent speculations about the future of welfare states.

The Significance of Social Welfare Attitudes in Young People’s Entrepreneurial Intentions

The present study analyses young people’s entrepreneurial intentions in Finland and Poland. Previous surveys have shown that the desire to become an entrepreneur is stronger in between Polish people than in between Finnish people. By exploring the social psychological factors that explain young people’s entrepreneurial intentions, the study particularly sought to determine whether the differences in entrepreneurial intention can be explained by social welfare attitudes. Survey respondents were 725 Finnish and 887 Polish students. Finnish and Polish young people approach entrepreneurship in quite different ways. Finnish young people appreciate entrepreneurs at a general level, but do not consider becoming entrepreneurs themselves, while the Poles think about entrepreneurship in the opposite manner. Furthermore, the results show that Finnish people’s trust in society is much stronger than that of their Polish counterparts. According to main recommendation, influencing young people’s confidence in their abilities and skills is more important than trying to influence general attitudes about entrepreneurship. Thus, entrepreneurship education has a key role in supporting young people’s entrepreneurship. National differences in intentions and in appreciation of entrepreneurship can be explained by societal and historical factors. Entrepreneurial intention is typically explained by psychological, economic, and cultural factors, and by social capital. Study results show that social political factors are also important in explaining entrepreneurial intentions.

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short‐Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self‐interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short‐term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self‐reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes—the United Kingdom and Denmark—we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.

The Changing Role of Race in Social Welfare Attitude Formation

Growth in the U.S. Latino population has prompted speculation that the “racialization” of welfare with respect to African Americans would eventually extend to Latinos. The authors assess this prediction, analyzing public attitudes toward welfare spending and national health insurance and their linkages to attitudes about Latinos and undocumented immigrants. The authors find significant relationships between affect for “illegal immigrants” and social welfare attitudes, conditional on party identification. The findings indicate that Americans view undocumented immigrants as the beneficiaries of social welfare policies, not the wider Latino population. Furthermore, the framing of social service utilization by undocumented immigrants could threaten the Democratic coalition.

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short-Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self-interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short-term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self-reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes — the UK and Denmark — we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.

Religiosity and Social Welfare: Competing Influences of Cultural Conservatism and Prosocial Value Orientation

This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity, which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand, religiosity promotes a prosocial value orientation, which in turn promotes support of federal social welfare provision. Across two national samples (Ns = 1,513 and 320) and one sample of business employees (N = 710), reliable support for this competing pathways model was obtained. We argue that research testing influences of nonpolitical individual differences on political preferences should consider the possibility of competing influences that are rooted in a combination of personality processes and contextual-discursive surroundings.

Religiosity and Social Welfare: Competing Influences of Cultural Conservatism and Prosocial Value Orientation

ABSTRACT This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity, which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand, religiosity promotes a prosocial value orientation, which in turn promotes support of federal social welfare provision. Across two national samples (Ns=1,513 and 320) and one sample of business employees (N=710), reliable support for this competing pathways model was obtained. We argue that research testing influences of nonpolitical individual differences on political preferences should consider the possibility of competing influences that are rooted in a combination of personality processes and contextual-discursive surroundings.

Welfare Attitudes and Social Expenditure: Do Regimes Shape Public Opinion?

This article examines the link between regime types, social expenditure, and welfare attitudes. By employing data on 19 countries taken from the World Values Survey, the main aim is to see to what degree the institutions of a country affect the attitudes of its citizens. According to Esping-Andersen (The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990) welfare regimes can be classified into Liberal, Conservative, and Social Democratic categories. With this as my point of departure, I put forward two research questions: the first concerns the direct influence of regime type on people’s attitudes; the second seeks to trace the contours of the regime types by arguing that both social expenditure and welfare attitudes are products of a country’s institutional arrangements. These questions are answered through regression modelling and by examining the interplay between welfare attitudes, social expenditure, and welfare regimes. First, we see that there are significant differences in aggregated attitudes between countries belonging to the Liberal and the Conservative regimes, with the former’s citizens holding more rightist views than those of the latter. This is explained by the history and organization of welfare benefits of the two variations of Esping-Andersen’s classification. Second, by graphing welfare attitudes against social expenditure the outline of the three regime types mentioned above may be seen. Similar correspondence is not found with regards to an Eastern European category. All in all, this study renders some support for the regime argument.

Social Welfare Attitudes and Ambivalence about the Role of Government

Evidence suggests that mistrust of government contributes directly to a lack of support for social welfare programs. An alternative explanation, however, is that many citizens are ambivalent concerning government and the role that it should play in society today and, as result, are less likely to support such programs. Based on our analysis of data from a 2004 telephone survey of Florida residents, we conclude that, first, ambivalent feelings concerning the federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States are fairly common; second, ambivalence has consequences for people's opinions on matters of public policy—specifically, those with conflicted feelings are less likely to endorse progressive action in the social welfare realm; third, self‐identified conservatives tend to be more ambivalent concerning government than liberals; and finally, the observed negative relationship between ambivalence and social welfare liberalism is especially pronounced among conservatives.

Welfare and the Discriminating Public: Evaluating Entitlement Attitudes in Post‐Communist Europe

Although post‐communist Europe retains elements of its socialist past, public opinion shows discernment in its welfare preferences. This analysis of post‐communist social welfare attitudes finds that post‐communist societies are selective in their support for social policies. First, welfare preferences center on two underlying realms: government responsibility and government spending; and second, welfare opinions and beliefs are not uniform across several social policies. Although many of the conclusions highlight the selective nature of these preferences, the example of the support for unemployment benefits points to how the transition from communist‐era welfare states to capitalist‐led assistance continues to influence public opinion in these countries.

Citizens and politics: perspectives from political psychology

Prologue 1. Political psychology and the study of citizens and politics James Kuklinski Part I. Affect and Emotion: Section introduction James Kuklinski 2. The role of affect in symbolic politics David O. Sears 3. Emotions and politics: the dynamic functions of emotionality George E. Marcus and Michael B. MacKuen 4. Cognitive neuroscience, emotion, and leadership Roger D. Masters 5. Commentary: emotion as virtue and vice Gerald L. Clore and Linda M. Isbell Part II. Political Cognition: Section introduction James Kuklinski 6. An experimental study of information search, memory, and decision making during a political campaign Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk 7. Political accounts and attribution processes Kathleen M. McGraw 8. The motivated construction of political judgments Charles S. Taber, Jill Glathar and Milton Lodge 9. Commentary: on the dynamic and goal-oriented nature of (candidate) evaluations Sharon Shavitt and Michelle R. Nelson Part III. Political Attitudes and Perceptions: Section introduction James Kuklinski 10. Public opinion and democratic politics: the problem of nonattitudes and the social construction of political judgment Paul M. Sniderman, Phillip E. Tetlock and Laurel Elms 11. Implications of a latitude-theory model of citizen attitudes for political campaigning, debate, and representation Gregory Andrade Diamond 12. Where you stand depends on what you see: connections among values, perceptions of fact, and political prescriptions Jennifer L. Hochschild 13. Commentary: the meaning of 'attitude' in representative democracies James H. Kuklinski and Jennifer Jerit Part IV. Political Values: Section introduction James Kuklinski 14. Social welfare attitudes and the humanitarian sensibility Stanley Feldman and Marco Steenbergen 15. American individualism reconsidered Gregory B. Markus 16. Political values judgments Laura Stoker Commentary: the study of values Kenneth Rasinski Commentary: the value of politics Melissa A. Orlie.

Status polarization of social welfare attitudes

This paper tests two competing theories of status polarization of social welfare attitudes. One theory, which can broadly be termedsocial-psychological, sees status polarization as a function of identification with social groups. The other, which can be termedeconomic, sees policy preferences as a function of the individual's expected utility from various policies. Using CPS data for the years 1956–1984, we find that the utility maximizing hypothesis has much more explanatory power for the middle and late 1970s. Social class identification, on the other hand, rivals utility maximization as an explanation of policy preferences during the years 1956–1964 and shows a slight resurgence in 1982 and 1984. These results suggest little prospect for a revival of the New Deal party coalitions, barring strong political leadership that defines issues in class terms and polarizes the electorate.