Advancing the study of political cleavages through experimentation: Revisiting regionalism and redistributive preferences in Canada

The maintenance of welfare state policies requires citizen support for the provision of a social safety net through taxation and redistribution. Research has shown that a diverse political polity presents a risk to the welfare state; however, Canada bucks the trend and does not see citizen support for economic redistribution decline in response to immigration-based population diversity. Using Canada as our case, we argue that scholars of welfare state politics and redistribution should turn their attention to other sources of population heterogeneity in an effort to better understand how different political cleavages affect citizens’ redistributive preferences. We use an online experimental survey to manipulate the in-group identity of 500 Canadians. The survey enables respondents to identify with other in-group identities along regional, linguistic, income-group, and urban/rural characteristics. Our results find that while Canadians do have a strong baseline preference for redistributive behaviour, regional and linguistic cleavages moderate this outcome.     

Religious Belief,Religious Denomination,and Preferences for Redistribution: A Comparison across 13 Countries

Despite clear evidence of a link between religion and welfare state development, research on public support for redistributive social policies has been slow to incorporate religion into models of public preferences. Does religious belief influence support for redistribution? If so, does religion necessarily increase hostility to redistribution as suggested by existing research? Or, do the Catholic and Protestant traditions generate different patterns of preferences consistent with Weber’s notion of a Protestant work ethic? This research explores these questions by comparing public support for redistribution across 13 European states. The data reveal a powerful and complex effect of religious belief on support for redistribution that works on both the individual and cultural levels. The evidence challenges existing research by demonstrating that the impact of religion is not uniform, but varies across different religious traditions, with Catholicism producing significantly greater support for redistribution than Protestantism.     

Divided by the Market,Divided by the State: Distribution,Redistribution and Welfare Attitudes in 47 Countries

This article examines the impact of income inequality and welfare state context on the extent to which the rich and poor share similar attitudes towards redistribution. It asks whether and how differences in attitudes, particularly those between income groups, are shaped by inequality and redistributive efforts. Based on a multi‐level analysis of individual survey data across 47 countries at three points in time, the article shows that such an interaction of individual characteristics and the macro‐context indeed matters considerably. While material self‐interest, unsurprisingly, explains part of the individual differences, the analysis also shows, for the first time, that both high inequality and strongly redistributive policies divide public opinion along the lines of socioeconomic position. Put differently, while market inequality may be associated with less cohesive attitudes, a highly redistributive welfare state does not seem to foster agreement among the public, either. These findings have important policy implications for advanced welfare states, including a renewed emphasis on ‘predistribution’ (i.e., policies that influence the primary distribution of income) in order to avoid the scenario of intensified redistributive conflicts.     

When and why politicians do not keep their welfare promises

Although the welfare state is a core theme in most national elections in Western democracies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the causes of welfare state pledge‐breaking. This article presents an argument that explains when governments do not do what they promised and tests it using an innovative research design with data covering four decades and 18 countries. The argument is able to account for several important but, until now, undescribed phenomena. First, nowadays, governments, on average, deliver less welfare than they promised, whereas in the 1970s they used to deliver more than promised. Second, the pledge‐breaking of governments has become highly dependent on the parliamentary opposition's position on the welfare issue. When the opposition favours fiscal and economic responsibility, governments’ tendency to deliver less welfare than promised is amplified. In contrast, when the opposition emphasises the positive benefits of generous welfare, such as equality and social justice, governments become more prone to keep their promises. Third, this conditional effect of the opposition is a recent occurrence that only emerged after the number of potential swing voters increased as class‐based voting gradually declined from the 1970s onwards.     

Trust in government and welfare regimes: Attitudes to redistribution and financial cheating in the USA and Norway

Abstract. Claims have been made that national institutions influence public preferences, as well as structuring patterns of social division. This article analyses attitudes to redistribution and financial cheating in Norway and the USA. On the aggregate level the results show that there are striking differences between the two countries regarding attitudes to redistribution and confidence in the state, while similar attitude patterns are found regarding cheating with taxes and benefits. Results endorse arguments emphasising that the design and scope of welfare state policies shape and determine their own legitimacy. There is less support for political trust arguments, which emphasise that the efficacy of political decision–making institutions promotes beliefs about trust in the state and views on government responsibilities. Similarly, arguments proposing that advanced welfare statism has undesirable effects on civic morality, such as cheating on taxes and benefits, are not supported empirically. Finally, while conflicts over redistribution are similarly structured in the USA and Norway, divisions over financial cheating are less clear–cut and vary cross–nationally.     

Cabinet ministers and inequality

Scholars and commentators increasingly wonder whether governments’ failure to address socio-economic inequalities is the result of unequal representation. Recent literature on policy responsiveness in the United States and Europe finds evidence that party and parliamentary policy proposals and actual policy outcomes are closer to the preferences of the rich than of the poor. However, the extent and character of such unequal representation remains thinly understood. Among the most thinly understood mechanisms are the political conditions that link socio-economic inequalities to unequal representation. This paper thickens our understanding of (unequal) representation by investigating the class composition of parliamentary cabinets and its effect on social welfare policy. With the aid of a new dataset on cabinet ministers’ social class, the paper shows that responsiveness to the social welfare preferences of poorer voters varies by cabinet ministers’ professional backgrounds, above and beyond the partisan orientation of the government.     

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty-first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working- and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle- and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle-class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working- versus middle-class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.     

Religion,partisanship and preferences for redistribution

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro-redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre-right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter-war state-building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro-redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.     

Welfare Dualism in Two Scandinavian Welfare States: Public Opinion and Party Politics

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.     

The Politics of Social Welfare Reform in Urban China: Social Welfare Preferences and Reform Policies

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societal groups’ preferences for social welfare has given rise to two lines of cleavage in urban China with respect to social welfare—between state sector and non-state sector employees and between labor market insiders and outsiders. The Chinese authoritarian regime’s political priority—economic growth with social stability—has induced the government to accommodate public social welfare preferences in social welfare policies. Therefore, the three dimensions of Chinese social welfare reform policies since the mid-1980s reflect and respond to the social cleavages derived from societal groups’ different preferences for social welfare.     

Authoritarianism,Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror

In the years following 9/11, surveys have revealed high levels of public support for policies related to the war on terror that, many argue, contravene long‐standing American ideals. Extant research would suggest that such preferences result from the activation of authoritarianism. That is, the terrorist attacks caused those predisposed toward intolerance and aggression to become even more intolerant and aggressive. However, using data from two national surveys, we find that those who score high in authoritarianism do not become more hawkish or less supportive of civil liberties in response to perceived threat from terrorism; they tend to have such preferences even in the absence of threat. Instead, those who are less authoritarian adopt more restrictive and aggressive policy stands when they perceive threat from terrorism. In other words, many average Americans become susceptible to “authoritarian thinking” when they perceive a grave threat to their safety.     

State Political Identity and Meta-Governance: Comparative Analysis of Governance Modes in Vegetable Retail in Urban China

Abstract

A government’s political identity is a key factor in meta-governance; it powerfully shapes a government’s policy aims and implementation preferences at the most abstract level and forms a stable governance mode. Dissonance between a pre-existing governance mode and the government’s evolved political identity will lead to governance failures and pose political challenges to the government. In the case of vegetable retail in Shanghai, the neoliberal developmental state transformed the hierarchical governance into market governance; but as it evolves into a corporatist welfare state, market imperfections come to be perceived as governance failures, and the government responds by reintroducing hierarchical measures.     

How do voters react when their party forms a coalition they dislike?

Abstract

While coalitions are conventionally seen as opportunities for parties to realise their policy preferences or to secure their control over political offices, recent studies show that citizens have preferences for coalitions which influence their vote choice. However, these studies do not consider how party and coalition preferences influence each other. This study uses panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study from the 2009, 2013 and 2017 German elections to determine whether voters punish the party for which they voted for being in a coalition they dislike or, alternatively, whether they become more supportive of that coalition. We find weak evidence for the former but strong evidence for the latter.     

Concede and Move On? One Nation Labour and the Welfare State

The idea that Labour has already lost the argument on welfare with the Conservatives, and with it the general election, is probably overplayed. If truth be told, Labour's construction and subsequent defence of the welfare state has always been something of a double‐edged sword for the Party, earning it brickbats as well as support, and sometimes as stranding it in the past, committing it to promises that were undeliverable and ultimately self‐defeating. The political response by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to the welfare trap set for them by David Cameron and George Osborne owes as much to New Labour as it does to ‘One Nation Labour’. That said, the latter does seem to be informing the Party's policy response, in particular its emphasis on restoring the contributory principle. Whether, however, this is practical politics given the inherently hybrid nature of Britain's welfare state and its heavy skew toward help for the elderly is a moot point. And whether ‘One Nation’ actually helps or hinders the Party in its quest for workable policies and a winning electoral formula is similarly debateable. Certainly, however much it is tempted to do so, Labour shouldn't waste too much valuable time trying to counter widespread myths about welfare. Nor should it overreact and obsess about the issue—or, indeed, pour out detailed policy too soon, if at all. Obviously, Labour needs to provide a direction of travel. However, that should focus not so much on welfare itself but on what the Party is proposing on the economy, on housing and on wages.     

Political theory in historical context. Reflections on Democratic Justice and the Social Contract by Albert Weale

In Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, Weale defends a contractarian theory of social justice following what he calls the ‘empirical method’, which consists in grounding ethics and politics on the observation of concrete examples of social contracts, rather than abstract speculations. In this paper, I will make three critical remarks. First, the empirical method is open to the same objections usually raised against more abstract approaches to social contract theory: by an appropriate choice of the starting point, one can justify any ethical or political position. Second, Weale’s focus on the societies that were successful in managing common pool resources appears arbitrary: other social organizations (e.g. hunters and gatherers societies) would be a more obvious choice. Finally, in following the empirical method, philosophers must be willing to import into ethics and politics the same problems of interpretation one encounters in theoretical social sciences. As an example, I will show that Weale’s position on the welfare state depends on the interpretation he gives of some practices observed in the societies he chooses as models. Different interpretations of the same practices would induce Weale to revise his positions.     

Status polarization of social welfare attitudes

This paper tests two competing theories of status polarization of social welfare attitudes. One theory, which can broadly be termedsocial-psychological, sees status polarization as a function of identification with social groups. The other, which can be termedeconomic, sees policy preferences as a function of the individual's expected utility from various policies. Using CPS data for the years 1956–1984, we find that the utility maximizing hypothesis has much more explanatory power for the middle and late 1970s. Social class identification, on the other hand, rivals utility maximization as an explanation of policy preferences during the years 1956–1964 and shows a slight resurgence in 1982 and 1984. These results suggest little prospect for a revival of the New Deal party coalitions, barring strong political leadership that defines issues in class terms and polarizes the electorate.     

State,social policy and subaltern citizens in adivasi India

This paper argues that social policies work towards the subject-making of subaltern citizens by defining the grammar of state–subaltern relationship. The Forest Rights Act of India (2006) defines the state–adivasi relationship through a two-way process: claim-making by the indigenes for forest rights, and reduction of the discourse by the state into a politics of recognition without redistribution. While adivasis have employed their agency in wresting social policies from the state through protracted struggles, they are also made subjects of the state as they go about the Forest Rights Act procedure. The paper further points out that adivasi struggles and the organisations representing them constitute a distinct adivasi society contra the middle-class civil society. Though the spirit of the Act envisages substantive redistribution, the state institutions and the monitoring Non-Governmental Organisations have yet to adopt redistribution as a core narrative.     

The Externalities of Inequality: Fear of Crime and Preferences for Redistribution in Western Europe

Why is the difference in redistribution preferences between the rich and the poor high in some countries and low in others? In this article, we argue that it has a lot to do with the rich and very little to do with the poor. We contend that while there is a general relative income effect on redistribution preferences, the preferences of the rich are highly dependent on the macrolevel of inequality. The reason for this effect is not related to immediate tax and transfer considerations but to a negative externality of inequality: crime. We will show that the rich in more unequal regions in Western Europe are more supportive of redistribution than the rich in more equal regions because of their concern with crime. In making these distinctions between the poor and the rich, the arguments in this article challenge some influential approaches to the politics of inequality.     

Implications of Occupational Locus and Focus for Public Service Motivation: Attitudes Toward Work Motives across Nations

Is occupational locus or focus important for public service motivation? Does national context influence public service motivation? To answer both questions, the author examines attitudes toward work motives from national samples in 11 North American and Western European nations using multilevel binary logistic regression analysis. The findings demonstrate that the locus of an occupation in government and its focus on a public service activity both are important in shaping preferences for work motives related to public service motivation. Also, the preference for work motives held by citizens is correlated with the type of welfare regime in a nation. Although it is less pronounced, some evidence suggests that the type of welfare regime influences preferences toward work motives among government employees.     

The tax-welfare mix: explaining Japan's weak extractive capacity

Abstract

Despite having the highest level of public debt in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), higher than Greece or Italy, Japan has one of the lowest aggregate tax burdens of the advanced industrial democracies. This paper asks why Japan, once described as a strong developmental state, has had such a weak extractive capacity, an inability to raise revenues to confront deficits and public debt? In contrast to the existing explanations that focus on political institutions, partisan preferences, or economic globalization, this article argues that Japan's ‘tax–welfare mix’ – the combination of taxes and redistributive welfare polices – undermined the state's long-term capacity to secure adequate tax revenue. More than just a source of revenue, taxes can be used directly to achieve redistributive goals, such as targeting low taxes and exemptions to specific groups. This study shows how Japan's tax–welfare mix diminished its extractive capacity through three mechanisms: the political lock-in of a redistributive social bargain struck around low taxes, the timing and sequencing of its tax policy and welfare development, and the erosion of public trust, which undermined tax consent. Beyond offering a new theory of extractive capacity, the tax–welfare mix explains aspects of Japan's tax structure that defy existing explanations and contributes to our understanding of the capitalist development state by highlighting the redistributive political function of tax policy and its long-term impact on state capacity.