Abstract:Universal basic income (UBI) has been proposed as a policy response to technological advances and structural inequality. Yet, recent data show that most conservatives in Europe and the US are strongly opposed to the welfare proposal. Can framing UBI as a policy that conforms to their ideological predispositions overcome such opposition? Exploiting the compatibility of UBI with core conservative ideals such as individualism and laissez-faire government, I design an original survey experiment that randomly expos… Show more
“…Believing that one’s job is unlikely to be automated only slightly decreases Democrat support for UBI, and thinking that one’s job is likely to be automated only modestly increases Democratic support. This finding of relatively strong, nonreactive Democratic support for UBI corroborates the results of Jordan et al (2022) and Yeung (2022).Figure 5.Predicting UBI support by partisanship, self-assessment of likelihood of own job being automated, and actual threat of automation (Table 2). …”
Section: Resultssupporting
confidence: 77%
“…The United States spends far less on these programs and generally has a stronger commitment to individualistic political values. The scant work on UBI in the American context indicates conservatives tend to oppose UBI and are unaffected by frames that highlight features of the policy that align with conservative ideology (Jordan et al, 2022; Yeung, 2022). More generally, classic American public opinion research suggests a core tension between equality of opportunity and an individual’s responsibility for their own economic future (Feldman, 1988).…”
Section: Automation Ubi and Public Opinionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…While some media stories tout UBI as an issue with bipartisan support, partisan and ideological polarization affects almost everything in American political behavior today, and it would be surprising if perceptions of UBI and automation were exceptions. Some initial research (Jordan et al, 2022; Yeung, 2022) finds that UBI is mostly a Democratic and liberal policy, and that increased messaging by political elites is likely to widen existing partisan and ideological divisions over UBI, but the issue is far from settled.…”
Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic descriptive findings are largely untested: we don’t know much about whether Americans support UBI, see automation as a threat to their job, or connect the two in any meaningful way. Using a Mechanical Turk survey of 3600 respondents, we examine the relationship between Americans’ perception of how much automation threatens their jobs, how much automation actually threatens their jobs, and their support for UBI. Our results indicate that while the public does not view automation as the same threat that elites do, Americans who believe their jobs will be automated are more likely to support UBI. These relationships, however, vary considerably by political party.
“…Believing that one’s job is unlikely to be automated only slightly decreases Democrat support for UBI, and thinking that one’s job is likely to be automated only modestly increases Democratic support. This finding of relatively strong, nonreactive Democratic support for UBI corroborates the results of Jordan et al (2022) and Yeung (2022).Figure 5.Predicting UBI support by partisanship, self-assessment of likelihood of own job being automated, and actual threat of automation (Table 2). …”
Section: Resultssupporting
confidence: 77%
“…The United States spends far less on these programs and generally has a stronger commitment to individualistic political values. The scant work on UBI in the American context indicates conservatives tend to oppose UBI and are unaffected by frames that highlight features of the policy that align with conservative ideology (Jordan et al, 2022; Yeung, 2022). More generally, classic American public opinion research suggests a core tension between equality of opportunity and an individual’s responsibility for their own economic future (Feldman, 1988).…”
Section: Automation Ubi and Public Opinionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…While some media stories tout UBI as an issue with bipartisan support, partisan and ideological polarization affects almost everything in American political behavior today, and it would be surprising if perceptions of UBI and automation were exceptions. Some initial research (Jordan et al, 2022; Yeung, 2022) finds that UBI is mostly a Democratic and liberal policy, and that increased messaging by political elites is likely to widen existing partisan and ideological divisions over UBI, but the issue is far from settled.…”
Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic descriptive findings are largely untested: we don’t know much about whether Americans support UBI, see automation as a threat to their job, or connect the two in any meaningful way. Using a Mechanical Turk survey of 3600 respondents, we examine the relationship between Americans’ perception of how much automation threatens their jobs, how much automation actually threatens their jobs, and their support for UBI. Our results indicate that while the public does not view automation as the same threat that elites do, Americans who believe their jobs will be automated are more likely to support UBI. These relationships, however, vary considerably by political party.
“…In this case, clarifying upfront that the standard self-reported instrument is deployed to measure symbolic ideology would be helpful (e.g., Barber and Pope, 2019;Jost, 2021). If their goal, however, is to understand how individual ideological predispositions-or how liberal and conservative systems of beliefs about policy issues-shape political attitudes, then alternative measures would be more appropriate (e.g., Wood and Oliver, 2012;Simas, 2023;Yeung, 2024). This is because the standard self-reported instrument, as our analysis suggests, is a crude-or even biased-measure of operational ideology.…”
American politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.
“…Further research has confirmed these findings, suggesting that factual information, presented in a nonpartisan way, plays a large role in opinion formation and change (For a summary of the previous literature see Swire-Thompson, DeGutis, and Lazer 2020). However, other research suggests that framing information, even in an ideologically amenable way, on certain issues like universal basic income (UBI) fails to influence partisans (Yeung 2022). However, other research finds the exact opposite impact on the same issue of UBIs, when framing with morality (Thomas et al 2023).…”
How do individuals process political information? What psychological mechanisms drive partisan bias? In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which partisan bias is driven by affect or ideology in a three-pronged approach informed by both psychological theories and recent advances in methodology. First, we use a novel survey experiment designed to disentangle the competing mechanisms of motivated bias and affect transfer. Second, we leverage multidimensional scaling methods for latent variable estimation for both partisan affect and ideology. Third, we employ a principled machine learning method, causal forest, to detect and estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. Contrary to previous literature, we find that affect is the sole moderator of partisan cueing processes, and only for out-party cues, suggesting that affect transfer dominates partisans' bias. These findings not only contribute to the literature on political behavior, but underscore the importance of careful measurement and robust subgroup analysis.
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