2024/02/16 by Macarena Ares, Silja Häusermann, Matthias Enggist +1 · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Social Policy and Reform Studies #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Local Government Finance and Decentralization
paper · doi:10.1086/729935
Studies of public opinion on welfare policies implement increasingly concrete and complex survey measures that frequently assume relative preferences on the part of respondents.Yet, we lack evidence on whether voters hold such structured attitudes toward welfare policies.We rely on novel survey data from eight West European countries to study horizontal attitudinal constraint in welfare policy preferences.Addressing both logical and relational consistency, we find that most respondents hold structured welfare belief systems and relative preferences about where reform is more important, even when confronted with complex questions and explicit trade-offs.Moreover, by addressing individual-level heterogeneity, we show that differences related to sociodemographic factors and political attitudes are rather minor.Consistent welfare preferences are not exclusive to highly sophisticated individuals.These results have important implications for survey research implementing increasingly complex measures of preferences, such as explicit trade-offs or rating tasks, in social policy as well as in other policy areas.P ublic opinion occupies a central place in analyses of wel- fare politics.A large body of work has addressed the determinants of citizens' preferences regarding economic redistribution, social spending, or concrete reforms on areas such as pensions, child care, or education, among others (e.g., Bremer and Brgisser 2023;Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017;Gallego and Marx 2017).While seminal studies relied on measures of general support for welfare state expansion (Brooks and Manza 2008), recent analyses have implemented more specific measures of social policy preferences.New items ask people which kinds of welfare policies they want to expand, for which beneficiaries, and the costs they would accept in exchange for these benefits (for some examples, see Bremer and Brgisser 2022;Gallego and Marx 2017;Klln and Wlezien 2016).The increasing specificity of reform scenarios presented in surveys assumes that the public holds coherent attitudes concerning these complex choices.However, assuming structured attitudes among the public (on any topic) could be problematic.Studying the degree of coherence and structure of citizens' preferences has been the focus of a large body of public opinion research, initiated by Converse (1964) and, thereafter, periodically revisited by different scholars (e.g.,