Predicting Support for Welfare Policies: The Impact of Attributions and Beliefs About Inequality

Bullock, Heather E.; Williams, Wendy R.; Limbert, Wendy M.

doi:10.1300/j134v07n03_03

Cited by 190 publications

(257 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This finding is in line with previous work showing that individualistic attribution of poverty predicts support for restrictive welfare policies (Bullock, Williams, & Limbert, 2003) and may constitute a form of essentialist thinking about low-income people, which feeds into a belief that society does not need to be restructured. Put into the context of increasing inequality within the United States, endorsement of system-justifying beliefs and essentialist attribution of poverty may be psychological mechanisms contributing to the deepening socioeconomic divide.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Social Class and Ideologies of Inequality: How They Uphold Unequal Societies

Rodríguez‐Bailón

Bratanova

Willis

et al. 2017

Journal of Social Issues

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Social Class and Ideologies of Inequality: How They Uphold Unequal Societies

Rodríguez‐Bailón

Bratanova

Willis

et al. 2017

Journal of Social Issues

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“…Kluegel and Smith (1986) showed that attributing poverty to structural factors was positively, whereas making individual attributions was negatively, associated with support for welfare policies. Others have confirmed that explanations that place the blame on the poor (i.e., individualistic attributions) are negatively correlated with people's support for policies designed to help those in need (e.g., Appelbaum, 2001;Bullock et al, 2003). Importantly, the relationship between people's attributions for poverty and their subsequent willingness to help the poor are mediated by the affective responses elicited by such attributions.…”

Section: Attributions For Povertymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Bullock, Williams, and Limbert (2003) had students evaluate 45 separate causes of poverty and found that, despite the diversity of these explanations, they loaded onto three distinct factors reflecting (a) individualistic, (b) structural (i.e., society), and (c) fatalistic causes. Others have shown similar factor structures to people's attributions for poverty in various countries including (a) Ethiopia (Wollie, 2009), (b) Finland (Niemela, 2008), (c) Lebanon (Abouchedid & Nasser, 2002;Nasser, 2007), and Turkey (Morçöl, 1997).…”

Section: Attributions For Povertymentioning

confidence: 99%

A latent profile analysis of attributions for poverty: Identifying response patterns underlying people’s willingness to help the poor

Osborne

Weiner

2015

Personality and Individual Differences

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“…Several studies have also found that racial minorities score higher than Whites on both individualism and structuralism (Bullock, Williams, and Limbert 2003;Hunt 1996Hunt , 2004Merolla, Hunt, and Serpe 2011); these findings support the concept of "dual consciousness." The literature has been mixed on the relationship between education and structuralism, but has generally found a negative relationship between education and individualism (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Some scholars have suggested the American emphasis on rugged individualism and self-reliance (Bellah et al 1985;Esping-Anderson 1990), while others have suggested out-and-out racism (Clawson 2002;Clawson and Trice 2000;Gilens 1999). A substantial body of research has identified beliefs about the causes of poverty as key predictors of support for welfare and other redistributive policies (Bullock, Williams, and Limbert 2003;Feagin 1975;Kluegel and Smith 1986;Shirazi and Biel 2005). Thus, an understanding of America's persistent anti-poor sentiment and restrictive welfare policy requires a careful examination of public beliefs and perceptions regarding who the poor are and why they are poor.…”

Section: Patricia Homan Lauren Valentino and Emi Weedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty

2017

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Prior research on stratification beliefs has investigated individuals' understandings regarding the causes of poverty in America. These past studies have uncovered demographic characteristics associated with individualist and structuralist explanations for poverty. In the current study, we will argue that Americans, like social scientists, envision poverty as a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon. We utilize a cultural cognition theoretical approach to conceptualize these understandings of poverty as schemas. We contend that a schema of poverty contains a set of unique associations regarding both demographic beliefs (who the poor are) and causal attributions (why they are poor). Using original data in a mixed-methods design that incorporates inductive and experimental components, we find that people differentiate between two key types of poverty: intergenerational poverty and downward mobility. People perceive each type of poverty as caused by a different set of factors and as experienced by a different group of people. The type of poverty envisioned is, in most cases, as important as or more important than a respondent's own demographic characteristics in predicting what type of causal attributions he or she makes for poverty. These findings underscore the importance of investigating different schemas of poverty in future stratification beliefs research.The authors wish to thank Mark Chaves, who supervised this project as part of the Logic of Inquiry course at Duke University. This study would not have been possible without his guidance and generous provision of funding. The authors also wish to thank Lynn Smith-Lovin for her support of this research project. Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss also provided eminently helpful feedback on this paper. We address this gap in the literature through a two-stage mixed-methods design. First, we inductively assess people's understandings of poverty using structured interviews. Next, we use these interviews to construct a survey that includes new items of poverty beliefs that reflect both interviewees' understandings of poverty and empirical facts about poverty from the current sociological literature on stratification.Finally, we utilize the theoretical concept of cultural schemas to identify the constituent parts of beliefs about poverty. To do so, we rely on the connectionist theory of cognition, which implies that individuals have mental models that are and Tranby 2007), we are, to our knowledge, the first to operationalize and apply the insights of schema theory to beliefs about poverty. In their foundational work on stratification beliefs, Kluegel and Smith (1986, 16) briefly mention schemas and suggest how they may be relevant to beliefs about poverty, but this aspect of their work has remained largely undeveloped. We concretize schemas of poverty as shared mental models of who is poor and why they are poor. We then demonstrate that people's perceptions regarding types of poverty differ in these two key respects, employing a survey-experiment to show that this is t...

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Predicting Support for Welfare Policies: The Impact of Attributions and Beliefs About Inequality

Cited by 190 publications

References 24 publications

Social Class and Ideologies of Inequality: How They Uphold Unequal Societies

Social Class and Ideologies of Inequality: How They Uphold Unequal Societies

A latent profile analysis of attributions for poverty: Identifying response patterns underlying people’s willingness to help the poor

Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty

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