The price of sharing: Support for universal and equal access to health care in diversifying neighborhoods

Is immigration undermining mass support for the welfare state? While an increase in the number of immigrants might not impact the willingness to fund existing universal programmes such as health care, it can undermine the normative commitment to universal and equal access to care. These norms are key to the support public health care systems usually command. Using British panel data matched to contextual data from the 1991 and 2001 censuses, we show that individuals who experience an increase in the share of foreign born in their neighborhood become less likely to support universal access to health care

Elite cues and economic policy attitudes: the mediating role of economic hardship

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes

Looking Up (to the Top) and Looking Down (to the Bottom): the Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences *

Abstract Most research on the demand side of redistributive politics assumes that individual social policy preferences can be ranked along a unidimensional right/conservative vs left/liberal polarity. However, this is not true of all individuals. This paper documents systematic heterogeneity in patterns of answers to social policy related questions. It argues that social policy preferences are better thought of as two dimensional: traditional left-right disagreements over egalitarian redistribution are empirically and theoretically distinct from attitudes toward the most visibly redistributive segments of the welfare state, namely policies targeted to the poor and the unemployed. While the first dimension correlates with proxies of material interest in the expected way, attitudes along the second dimension do not. One's position on what is often described as the "cultural" axis of politics (e.g authoritarian values and attitudes towards ethnic diversity and immigrants) better predicts individual attitude on the latter. This approach to social-policy preferences provides a useful framework for studying recent patterns of change in advanced capitalist countries, shedding a new light on the demand-side politics of welfare state reform

Demand for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of mass attitudes toward redistributive social policies in post-industrial democracies: How have these attitudes changed over time? What factors and mechanisms drive these changes? According to workhorse models in political economy, as inequality increases, support for redistributive social policies should also increase, especially among those most likely to benefit from them. Yet, despite a sharp growth in income inequality in the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1970's, there is no evidence that attitudinal trends match these predictions. Drawing from findings in the behavioral sciences on mental processes of attitude formation and on the role of other-oriented concerns, I argue that political economy's workhorse models perform well only under specific scope conditions. Once these conditions are accounted for, observed trends become less puzzling. First, workhorse models only capture one component of demand for redistribution, namely support for redistribution conceived as taking from the "rich" (redistribution from), and ignore a separate component, support for redistribution conceived as giving to the "poor" (redistribution to). These two facets of redistribution, I argue, prime different individual motives: self-interested income maximization on the one hand, and other-oriented social affinity with welfare beneficiaries on the other, which is shaped by social ranking and non-economic moral dispositions. Second, attitudinal change that matches these models' predictions is conditional on whether elites politicize redistributive issues. The nature and structure of the options available in one's political environment impact the kind of choices citizens make, i.e. the motives that guide attitude formation. I show how elite competition over distinct redistributive agendas increases the likelihood that individuals will translate their economic circumstances into support for, or opposition to, redistribution. Through a context-sensitive analysis of longitudinal survey data, I show how most of the action in the UK and the US has happened through other-oriented motives. The decline in the predictive power of income in these countries, has been mirrored in both countries by an increase in the predictive power of moral values. Differences in the choice sets provided by elite-level electoral competition help explain how this plays out differently on each side of the Atlantic

Replication Data for The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences

This file comprises of the BSAS and ESS data used for the January 2015, Journal of Politics article entitled "The Two facets of Social Policy" by C.Cavaille and K.Trump

Replication Data for: "Education and Anti-Immigration Attitudes: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Reforms across Western Europe"

Code and data to replicate the results in the main text and supporting information of "Education and Anti-Immigration Attitudes: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Reforms across Western Europe.