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

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-552
Author(s):  
Kerri Milita ◽  
Jaclyn Bunch ◽  
Sara Yeganeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Risk Exposure ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Welfare Spending ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
American States ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIs 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.

scholarly journals Less Bang for Your Buck? How Social Capital Constrains the Effectiveness of Social Welfare Spending

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory E. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Economic Insecurity ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Welfare Spending ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Open Question

Rising economic insecurity in recent decades has focused attention on the importance of social welfare programs in managing household financial stability. Some governments are more effective than others in managing this outcome, and informal social institutions help explain why. Social capital is expected to shape economic security through multiple mechanisms, but whether the effect is to magnify or mitigate volatility is an open question. Part of the answer has to do with how social capital interacts with policy implementation, and whether it conditions the effectiveness of government spending. Evidence from the U.S. states from 1986 to 2010 fails to support a benevolent social capital thesis—not only is social capital associated with greater economic insecurity, there is no evidence that it improves social welfare effectiveness. However, greater spending on some social programs can mitigate the adverse impact of social capital on economic security.

Outsourcing Welfare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Germano
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
Rural Mexico

This book is about how remittances—the money international migrants send to family members in their home countries—contribute to economic, political, and social stability in developing countries. Remittances are motivated by altruism, they rise in times of crisis, and they are spent largely on basic goods and services. Because of these qualities, remittances are transnational safety nets that serve a function similar to the social welfare programs most developed countries use to insulate citizens from market, environmental, and life-course risks. Outsourcing Welfare argues that counting on expatriates to send money home has become a de facto social welfare policy in many cash-strapped developing countries during an age of austerity, climate change, and globalization. Through ethnographic research in a coffee-growing village and a pork-producing town in rural Mexico, Outsourcing Welfare shows that the Mexican government was able to count on people to go abroad and send back remittances to compensate for economic shocks that occurred during Mexico’s neoliberal market transition. The book also analyzes survey data collected during Mexico’s 2007–2008 food crisis to illustrate how remittances reduced economic grievances and the demand for government-provided welfare. In later chapters, the book explores the effects of remittances on economic grievances, civil unrest, and political behavior in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America during the global food and financial crises of 2008–2011.

Social Welfare Policy in Japan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Estévez-Abe
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Demographic Aging ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
Welfare Politics

This chapter surveys main topics and debates related to the Japanese welfare state. For a long time, scholars disagreed on the basic facts about Japan’s postwar welfare state. Some said it was too small, other said it was not. This chapter solves this mystery by introducing the concept of functional equivalents. It explains how social welfare programs and their functional equivalents had become important components of the so-called Japanese model of capitalism in the postwar period. Once the new socioeconomic conditions that arose in the 1990s (demographic aging, economic stagnation, and financial liberalization), pressures for change intensified. The chapter demonstrates how the electoral context had set the political parameters on welfare politics in Japan differently before and after the 1994 electoral reform.

Social Welfare Attitudes and Immigrants as a Target Population: Experimental Evidence

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jake Haselswerdt
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Target Population ◽  
Observational Research ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Geographic Context ◽  
Welfare Attitudes

What makes some Americans assume that social welfare programs will benefit immigrants rather than native-born Americans? How do these assumptions shape their attitudes about policy? Recent observational research has shown that immigration attitudes and social welfare attitudes are strongly correlated, but we lack evidence of exactly how this relationship works. In this pre-registered survey experiment, I study respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries of a generic social welfare policy, and test the effects of different “threat” primes on the assumption that the policy benefits immigrants rather than native-born Americans. I find that a prime constructing immigrants as a fiscal threat increases the likelihood that a respondent will make this assumption, while a prime emphasizing cultural or demographic threat has no significant effect. These effects vary by geographic context, but not by relevant attitudes. Attitudes about immigration become an important predictor of policy approval when this assumption is triggered.

Remittances and the Politics of Austerity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Germano
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
International Migrants

Remittances sent by international migrants have become an increasingly important source of social welfare in the developing world. This chapter explores what remittances are, why migrants send them, and how poor families use them. I argue in this chapter that remittances are more than just gifts from one relative to another. They play a larger social welfare role that complements funds that governments spend on social welfare programs. This social welfare function has become particularly important in recent decades as developing countries have prioritized austerity and integrated into volatile global markets. I argue that by filling a welfare gap in an age of austerity, remittances help to reduce the suffering and anger that so often trigger political and social instability during times of economic crisis.

Trust in a Polarized Age

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Political Trust ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Downward Spiral

Americans today don’t trust each other and their institutions as much as they used to. The collapse of social and political trust arguably has fueled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is the decline in trust inevitable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in war-like politics, institutional decay, and possibly even civil war? This book argues that American political and economic institutions are capable of creating and maintaining trust, even through polarized times. Combining philosophical arguments and empirical data, the author shows that liberal democracy, markets, and social welfare programs all play a vital role in producing social and political trust. Even more, these institutions can promote trust justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic human rights.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Block Grant ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

The Impact of Social Welfare Programs

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Work Incentives ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Training

This article briefly reviews the conservative, liberal and radical approaches to social welfare programs, and compares these with empirical evidence from the USA. Conservatives stress that welfare programs reduce work incentives and undermine individual initiatives. Liberals suggest that cuts in welfare have created increased hardship without changing significantly the incentives to work. The Massachusetts Employment and Training Program is analyzed from both perspectives. The Program does not reduce benefits but instead increases work incentives. The results of this Program are skeptically reviewed by radicals as well as some liberals.

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