How does the public decide who is deserving of welfare benefits? To shed light on this question, we investigate whether the CARIN principles of deservingness—specifically the ideas of control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need—impact the public's perception of American welfare target groups. We draw contrast between traditional welfare programs and pandemic‐related programs to gain a more comparative understanding of the principles' effects as well as to determine what role the pandemic may play in shaping welfare perceptions. We report that positive, deserving social constructions exist for recipients of both traditional and pandemic‐related welfare programs, and we find evidence that the distinction between traditional and pandemic‐related programs is important for deservingness perceptions in the US. Overall, these results suggest the importance of the CARIN criteria in an American context.
Can experience with one set of policies result in support for a set of different, but related, policies? To show how this is possible, we develop a new dimension of policy feedback effects missing from prior studies – outcome distance. We then examine what we call a middle-distance outcome and apply this concept to the case of welfare attitudes in the United States. A novel counterfactual survey design is used to estimate the within-subject effects of experience with pandemic-related relief efforts (that is, stimulus checks, unemployment assistance) on attitudes towards broader welfare programmes like TANF, SNAP, SSI and Medicaid. The evidence suggests that attitudes towards broader welfare initiatives may have become more supportive as a result of the pandemic and associated policies, implying that specific policies and events can have feedback effects on outcomes that are some medium-distance away, such as other policies of a similar type. Future research ought to further explore this proposed dimension of feedback effects.
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