doctoral candidate adelphi university EAST MEADOW, New York, United States
Overview: The political-economic attitudes are driven by contextual influences. This study hypothesizes that the fundamental shift in the socio-economic environments might induce the changes of American welfare attitudes. This study investigates how American welfare attitudes have changed after the 2008 financial crisis and what individual-level factors influenced the changes.Proposal text:
Background: The political-economic attitudes are driven by contextual influences. The literature argues that political ideology, individualistic values, and demographic characteristics might affect the formation of citizens’ welfare attitudes (Goossen, 2020; Rose et al., 2018; Toikko & Rantanen, 2020). Previous research also found that citizens in liberal welfare regimes tend to have less favorable attitudes toward welfare than those in social democratic regimes or conservative regimes. However, prior research paid little attention to how citizens’ welfare attitudes changed in the shift of social contexts. Since the financial crisis of 2008, US society has experienced severe economic insecurity, as well as the progressive expansion of welfare policies such as the Economic Stimulus Act and the Affordable Care Act. This study hypothesizes that the fundamental shift in the socio-economic environments might induce the changes of welfare attitudes among the US citizens. This study empirically investigates how American welfare attitudes have changed after the financial crisis and what individual-level factors influenced the changes of American welfare attitudes.
Method: This study used secondary data from the World Values Survey: the wave of 2006 as pre-crisis cohort and the wave of 2017 as post crisis cohort. The survey used a simple random sampling method, and the sample size was 1,249 in 2006 and 2,596 in 2017, respectively. In consideration of Jakobsen’s conceptualization of welfare attitudes, this study operationalized welfare attitudes into three indicators: Preference for (1) income equality, (2) government responsibility, and (3) redistribution through tax. This study calculated un-weighted mean as the generalized welfare attitude scores. The eleven individual-level variables (age, sex, race, education, marital status, health, employment, income, social class, political affiliation, and religiosity) were included in the models as covariates. Employing the cohort analysis method, this study examined the changes of American welfare attitudes between 2006 and 2017 at the individual and the country level.
Results: First, the aggregated cohort comparison shows that American welfare attitudes significantly increased from 5.02 in 2006 to 5.69 in 2017 (t=9.91, Cohen’s d=.35) at the country level. This indicates that Americans might have had more favorable attitudes toward welfare after the 2008 financial crisis. This change was the highest improvement among OECD countries. Second, the fixed-effect model shows that controlling for other covariates, age, education, employment, social class and political affiliation were the factors impacting on American welfare attitudes in 2006. However, the decisive factors in 2006, except for political affiliation, no longer had significant effects in 2017. Instead, religiosity and health status along with political affiliation significantly influenced welfare attitudes in 2017. Particularly, political affiliation was the most important factor to explain American welfare attitudes in 2017.
Conclusion: The findings imply that US society holds more supportive attitudes on welfare after the financial crisis. In addition, the findings reveal that individuals’ ideological beliefs, represented by political affiliation and religiosity, became more decisive factors explaining American welfare attitudes rather than demographic factors. Based on the results, we discuss the relationship between social values and welfare policies.
