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It could happen to you: how perceptions of personal risk shape support for social welfare policy in the American States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

Kerri Milita ,
Jaclyn Bunch  and
Sara Yeganeh
Kerri Milita
Affiliation:
Department of Politics & Government, Illinois State University, USA E-mail: kmilita@ilstu.edu
Jaclyn Bunch
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, University of South Alabama, USA E-mail: jbunch@southalabama.edu
Sara Yeganeh
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, USA E-mail: sara.yeganeh@stonybrook.edu
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Abstract

Is public support for social welfare programs’ contingent on an individual’s exposure to risk? Prior work has examined whether tough economic times lead people to “reach out” (i.e. become more accepting of government expansion of social welfare programs) or “pull back” (i.e. become less supportive of welfare). However, these studies do not account for the conditional relationship between an individual’s exposure to risk and his or her risk orientation. Using new survey data, we find that an individual’s risk orientation moderates the relationship between risk exposure and public support for welfare spending. When individuals perceive exposure to economic risk, those who are risk averse are highly supportive of welfare expansion; those who are risk acceptant become less supportive. Broadly, these findings suggest that public support for welfare spending is contingent on whether an individual perceives exposure to risk and, if so, the individual’s propensity to tolerate that risk.

Keywords

government spendingopinionredistributionriskwelfare
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 535 - 552
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Milita et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/1VDZE9
Link
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Milita et al. supplementary material

Tables S1-S7 and Figures S1-S4

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