Numbers and Attitudes towards Welfare State Generosity
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Author | Anthony Kevins,Carsten Jensen |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718780516 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
780516PCX0010.1177/0032321718780516Political StudiesJensen and Kevins
research-article2018
Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(2) 496 –516
Numbers and Attitudes
© The Author(s) 2018
towards Welfare State
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Generosity
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718780516
DOI: 10.1177/0032321718780516
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Carsten Jensen1 and Anthony Kevins2
Abstract
Between pro-retrenchment politicians and segments of the media, exaggerated claims about the
generous benefits enjoyed by those on welfare are relatively common. But to what extent, and
under what conditions, can they actually shape attitudes towards welfare? This study explores
these questions via a survey experiment conducted in the UK, examining: (1) the extent to
which the value of the claimed figure matters; (2) if the presence of anchoring information about
minimum wage income has an impact; and (3) whether these effects differ based on egalitarianism
and political knowledge. Results suggest that increasing the size of the claimed figure decreases
support in a broadly linear fashion, with anchoring information important only when (asserted)
benefit levels are modestly above the minimum wage income. Egalitarianism, in turn, primarily
matters when especially low figures are placed alongside information about minimum wage, while
low-knowledge respondents were more susceptible to anchoring effects than high-knowledge
ones.
Keywords
welfare state, benefit generosity, public opinion, United Kingdom
Accepted: 1 May 2018
There is a long history of politicians trotting out claims about the generosity of welfare
programmes in order to create public support for retrenching them. Ronald Reagan’s
famous ‘welfare queen’, raking in over $150,000 a year, is but one example of this use of
massaged or even falsified statistics about welfare benefit levels. Whether these figures
are meant to highlight benefit fraud – as with Reagan – or inequities in the welfare system
– as with former British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s complaint about
families receiving ‘£100 000 a year in benefit’ – their persistence as a trope is striking.
And not only are these campaigns clearly viewed as vote-winners, but they also often give
rise to real policy changes as well: the benefit cap, introduced in 2013 under the
1Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
2School of Governance, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Anthony Kevins, School of Governance, Utrecht University, Bijlhouwerstraat 6, 3511 ZC Utrecht, The
Netherlands.
Email: a.v.kevins@uu.nl
Jensen and Kevins
497
Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK, was precisely intended to ensure
that benefit levels never exceeded a threshold that the government designated the ‘aver-
age earned income of working households’ (see Kennedy et al., 2016).
But to what extent do these sorts of claims about welfare generosity actually affect
public opinion? Clearly, at least part of the intention in emphasizing overly generous
benefits is to generate a reaction among the public, attracting both votes and support for
welfare reform. Yet this raises another question: at what point do citizens find benefits to
be ‘overly’ generous? To take the British example, £100,000 is obviously a lot of money
for someone on social assistance, since it is multiple times larger than the average income
in Britain – but how would people react to a more realistic yet still substantial, figure of,
say, a quarter of that size?
Drawing theoretical inspiration from existing research on public opinion formation
(e.g. Bartels, 2005; Cruces et al., 2013; Petersen, 2015) and attitudes towards the welfare
state (e.g. Giger and Nelson, 2013; Jæger, 2012; Wenzelburger and Hörisch, 2016), we
explore these questions using an experiment conducted via a nationally representative
survey of just under 2000 Britons. In doing so, we investigate: (1) the extent to which
claims about benefit levels affect beliefs about whether the welfare system is too gener-
ous, and (2) the impact of receiving information about the minimum wage alongside these
claims. In combination with validated measures of respondents’ egalitarianism and politi-
cal knowledge, this survey provides important insights into how numerical information
affects attitudes about the right levels of welfare generosity.
We find a number of interesting patterns. First, claims about benefit levels do indeed have
an impact on whether or not people think benefits are too generous. Broadly speaking, the
higher the claimed level of benefits, the more people believe benefits are too generous.
Respondents told that the typical family on benefits get £29,000 per year are notably more
likely to think that benefits are too generous than those told that the typical family on benefits
get £9000. Second, situating these claims alongside information about the minimum wage
matters, but only for those told that benefits were modestly higher than minimum wage
income. Third, respondent egalitarianism primarily makes a difference when especially low
figures are placed alongside information about minimum wage income. Finally, low-knowl-
edge respondents appear to have been particularly susceptible to anchoring effects.
Our findings, in brief, underscore how powerful using (inflated) figures can be for
garnering support for welfare state cutbacks. By contrast, objective reference points – or
at least the minimum wage income – matter rather less. These findings add to an emerg-
ing literature on ‘benefit myths’ and how these may affect popular attitudes towards the
welfare state (Geiger, 2017a, 2017b; Jensen and Tyler, 2015). More broadly, we also
contribute to the literatures on information (e.g. Kuklinski et al., 2000; Leeper and
Slothuus, 2017) and framing (e.g. Chong and Druckman, 2007) in public opinion forma-
tion by indicating how the strategic use of construed information can shift attitudes. As
such, our results will be relevant not just for scholars preoccupied with the politics of the
welfare state, but for all those concerned with the interaction between elite communica-
tion and citizen opinion formation.
Preferences for Benefit Generosity in the Welfare State
Literature
The starting point of the contemporary welfare state literature on public preferences dates
back to Pierson’s (1994) seminal Dismantling the Welfare State? The core proposition of
498
Political Studies 67(2)
Pierson is that the welfare state has become hugely popular among the majority of voters,
and that politicians have therefore been forced to either hide their cutbacks or refrain from
retrenchment altogether. Indeed, assumptions about the welfare state’s broad popularity
have been borne out repeatedly by surveys documenting that voters usually prefer
increased spending on the welfare state, and that they typically believe it is the govern-
ment’s responsibility to provide protection in cases of unemployment, sickness, and other
misfortunes (e.g. Jæger, 2012; Jensen, 2014; Van Oorschot, 2006). This is frequently the
case even when respondents are confronted with trade-offs between social spending and
taxation: the British Social Attitudes Survey, for example, documents that the proportion
of Britons wanting to spend less on the welfare state in order to reduce taxation has never
surpassed 10% since polling began in 1983. By 2016, fully 48% wanted the government
to spend more on the welfare state, while less than 5% wanted cuts (Curtice, 2017: 1–2).
Yet the broadly pro-welfare state stance of citizenries has quite obviously not meant
that welfare cuts have been off the table, and analysis of large-N datasets has docu-
mented the considerable rollback of entitlements in many Western welfare states (Allan
and Scruggs, 2004; Korpi and Palme, 2003). The sheer frequency of retrenchment would
seem to fly in the face of Pierson’s claim that citizens love the welfare state so much that
any attempt at cutting it back will lead to electoral disaster. Giger and Nelson (2010) and
Schumacher et al. (2013), moreover, found that governments’ vote shares did not sys-
tematically drop from one election to the next in the wake of cutbacks; voters occasion-
ally seem to have reacted to reforms, but much of the time cutbacks had no effect on
aggregated vote shares. Yet regardless of the precise extent to which voters are bothered
by retrenchment (c.f. Lee et al., 2017), these debates raise the possibility that voters’
preferences might be less one-dimensional than Pierson’s argument suggests. As a con-
sequence, micro-level analysis of welfare preferences offers a particularly valuable route
forward.
For our purposes, the key consideration here is that for many citizens, pro-welfare
state stances exist in balance with other considerations, often moral or economic in nature
(e.g. Ryan, 2014). In a simple but analytically powerful move that highlights this com-
plexity, Giger and Nelson (2013) argue that voters can care both about the welfare state
and a sound economy, but that the weight given to each dimension varies among people.
Some are ‘unconditional believers’ of the welfare state, while others are more ‘condi-
tional believers’, meaning that they ascribe roughly equal value to the welfare state and
the economy (empirically speaking, few individuals ascribe more weight to the economy
than the welfare state). The authors find that only...
To continue reading
Request your trial