The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare

Feldman, Stanley; Steenbergen, Marco R.

doi:10.2307/2669244

Cited by 241 publications

(241 citation statements)

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“…The fact that a sizeable minority (14-18%) of American, Indian, and British participants prefers a higher tax rate for the wealthy even when that yields less money for the poor underscores that redistribution features spiteful motives (45,53,57,88) alongside humanitarian motives (57,62,86), as predicted by the three-player model.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

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et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Unlike supporting redistribution, aiding the needy is predicted by compassion alone (62). Now consider envy.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

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et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…We expect people to be primarily concerned about efficient coverage (i.e., that they and others are covered in times of health problems) and less about whether this coverage necessarily stems from government funding or private insurance. While citizens are motivated to support governmentfunded health care in general, the U.S. debates suggest that if elites raise questions about efficiency and provide alternative policy solutions to the issue of coverage, then citizens can come to support these alternatives along partisan lines (see also Feldman and Steenbergen 2001;Jensen 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care

Jensen

Petersen

2016

American J Political Sci

170

151

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“…Men are therefore less likely to believe that the government is responsible for decreasing social inequality and thus favor a smaller scope of government. By contrast, women are more likely to attribute inequality to structural factors, and believe the government should play a larger, more active role in improving citizens' daily lives (Carroll 2006;Shapiro and Mahajan 1986) and ensuring equal opportunities for all citizens (Feldman and Steenbergen 2001;Howell and Day 2000). This emphasis on egalitarianism and preferences for a broad scope of government shows through in specific policy positions, for example, women's greater average support for the welfare state (Barnes and Córdova 2016;Carroll 2006;Deckman and McTague 2015).…”

Section: Origins Of Gender Gaps In Issue Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

American Party Women

Barnes

Cassese

2016

Political Research Quarterly

100

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ArticleTraditionally, women were more politically conservative than men. Yet, in the early 1980s, women began realigning, shifting to the left of men and reversing the gender gap in developed democracies across the globe (BoxSteffensmeier, De Boef, and Lin 2004;Inglehart and Norris 2003). Today, women in the United States are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party, vote for Democratic Party candidates, and hold liberal positions on social issues. Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding the gender gap in public opinion, existing research focuses almost exclusively on average differences between men and womenemphasizing women's liberal tendencies and defining women's political identity almost entirely in liberal terms. While women's greater average liberalism is well established empirically, approximately one in four women identify with the Republican Party-a figure that translates into millions of American women who buck this liberal trend (Deckman 2016). Because existing research has focused on average differences between men and women, we know little about sources of heterogeneity among women.Does the gender gap extend to the Republican Party, with Republican women holding more liberal views than their male counterparts? To date, most research about Republican women has focused on the elite level, investigating factors like party structure, activists and donors, conservative women's groups, and candidates for political office (Cooperman and Crowder-Meyer 2015;Thomsen 2015). Comparatively little research has considered the attitudes and issue preferences of Republican women in the electorate. 1 In recent years, the United States has seen a rise in high-profile Republican women running for office and the development of a conservative women's movement (Schreiber 2008(Schreiber , 2014. The surge in conservative appeals to women, coupled with the increased salience of and polarization on "women's issues"-for example, the Mommy Wars and the Republican War on Women-requires that scholars revisit the conventional wisdom about women's political identities.Building on the burgeoning body of research on partisan sorting, we develop expectations regarding the intersection between gender and party. Theories of partisan sorting suggest that women and men sort themselves into the party that best represents their views-such that the AbstractResearch on the gender gap in American politics has focused on average differences between male and female voters. This has led to an underdeveloped understanding of sources of heterogeneity among women and, in particular, a poor understanding of the political preferences of Republican women. We argue that although theories of ideological sorting suggest gender gaps should exist primarily between political parties, gender socialization theories contend that critical differences lie at the intersection of gender and party such that gender differences likely persist within political parties. Using survey data from the 2012 American National Election ...

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The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare

Cited by 241 publications

References 40 publications

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care

American Party Women

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