Beyond Positive and Negative: New Perspectives on Feedback Effects in Public Opinion on the Welfare State

Abstract

The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.

The welfare reality check: how policy-specific information influences public responsiveness

“…A final remark is that this study has demonstrated the existence of shortterm feedback effects. The question remains if this process will also give rise to feedback effects that reinforce a long-term development path (Busemeyer et al 2019). In the case of Swedish welfare policy, such development could imply a turn of the "policy mood" in direction of a more restrictive privatization policy.…”

“…Wlezien 1995, see further below) where individuals are found to adapt their opinions in relation to policy change, there is according to research overviews on policy feedback by Campbell (2012) as well as Larsen (2018) inconclusive evidence that changes in policies result in changes in opinion. Busemeyer et al (2019) suggest that some of the disagreements and contradictions of previous research is due to conceptual ambiguity, where research, for example, focus on different time perspectives.…”

Do Citizens Care About Government Debt? Evidence from Survey Experiments on Budgetary Priorities

“…Voters should only react to different fiscal policies if they also care about them. Third, it enables us to study elite responsiveness to public opinion more carefully (e.g., Busemeyer et al, 2020;Hager and Hilbig, 2020). Governments may be equally responsive to all citizens' policy positions, but they can still give more weight to the priorities of high-than low-income people (Bartels, 2018).…”

Class politics in the sandbox? An analysis of the socio‐economic determinants of preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare

“…Thus, generous childcare policies appear to generate selfreinforcing feedback effects which increase overall support and acceptance of these policies (cf. Busemeyer et al, 2019;Neimanns, 2020).…”

“…2 We take into account all types of public and private forms of formal early childhood education and care for the whole age range from age zero up to the beginning of compulsory schooling. 3 Inspired by the extensive literature on policy feedback (Busemeyer, Abrassart, & Nezi, 2019), we expect that attitudes and preferences are strongly shaped by institutional contexts, that is, the availability and affordability of childcare. The analysis in this article makes use of the INVEDUC ('Investing in Education in Europe') survey (Busemeyer, Garritzmann, Neimanns, & Nezi, 2018), which is a representative survey of public opinion in Western European countries (United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Germany and France) conducted in 2014.…”