Ideology, Information, and Social Welfare Preferences

Abstract

Research shows that Americans have a generally poor understanding of welfare programs. Providing information about such programs has the potential to shape public preferences, but we argue that such effects may differ based on the content of the information and its correspondence with existing ideological beliefs. Using original survey experiments embedded in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we analyze how the relationship of ideology with welfare programs varies in response to different types of negative information about the program, and different descriptions of policy design. We find that information about inadequate benefits has a larger negative impact on welfare support for liberals than for conservatives but that both liberals and conservatives may be equally concerned about fraud and inefficiency. Other information about policy design has the expected conditional effect: state (as opposed to federal) funding and short time limits for benefits are more appealing to conservatives than liberals.