The paradoxical effect of welfare knowledge: Unveiling income cleavage over attitudes to welfare in South Korea
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Author | Seiki Tanaka,Sijeong Lim |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120906009 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120906009
International Political Science Review
2022, Vol. 43(1) 67 –84
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120906009
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The paradoxical effect of welfare
knowledge: Unveiling income
cleavage over attitudes to welfare
in South Korea
Sijeong Lim
Korea University, South Korea
Seiki Tanaka
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Abstract
The extent of the rich–poor divide in attitudes to welfare varies across societies. Existing studies focus on
the progressivity of the welfare system and macroeconomic conditions to explain cross-society variation.
We shed light on another factor that we believe is key to understanding the variation: the public’s knowledge
of the welfare state. We suggest that the prevalent ignorance of how welfare state institutions work dilutes
the rich–poor divide over social spending, especially in emerging welfare states. We empirically illustrate our
point using original survey data from South Korea, a country where previous studies repeatedly found little
or no effect of economic class on welfare state attitudes. We reveal a strong income-based cleavage over
social spending in a subset of the Korean population with more accurate knowledge of the welfare system.
Our findings carry important implications for understanding and projecting welfare state politics in a broader
set of emerging welfare states.
Keywords
Welfare state politics, support for social spending, income cleavage, knowledge, South Korea
Introduction: The varying effects of income on welfare attitudes
In most societies, income is a significant determinant of support for the welfare state. A wealthy
individual tends to be less supportive of social spending than a low-income individual. The size of
the income effect on welfare attitudes, however, varies across societies, and the income-based
Corresponding author:
Sijeong Lim, Division of International Studies, Korea University, International Studies Hall 525, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul
02841, South Korea.
Email: sijeonglim@korea.ac.kr
906009IPS0010.1177/0192512120906009International Political Science ReviewLim and Tanaka
research-article2020
Article
68 International Political Science Review 43(1)
cleavage over the welfare state is stronger in some countries than others. What explains this cross-
country variation?
Several studies attribute the variation to national welfare state institutions that shape self-inter-
ested individuals’ calculation of welfare benefits vis-à-vis costs. Others focus on macroeconomic
conditions under which other-regarding and solidaristic motivations are heightened and, in turn,
temper income-based self-interest. In this paper, we shed light on another source of variation: indi-
viduals’ knowledge/ignorance of the welfare state.
We argue that in some societies, the public has, by and large, a limited understanding of how the
distributive institutions of the welfare state work. Citizens are often unaware of or not attentive to
the fiscal constraints on public spending, despite the simple fact that more expenditure requires
raising more revenue. Many are also surprisingly ignorant of the taxes they are paying. More
importantly, as we elaborate in the next section, the lack of such knowledge is expected to have
distinctive effects on the rich and the poor. We argue that wealthy people who are unaware of the
tax system tend to be more supportive of the welfare state than more knowledgeable ones in the
same income bracket. On the contrary, the less knowledgeable and less affluent are less supportive
of the welfare state than those who are less affluent but well informed. Hence, the pervasive igno-
rance dilutes the income-based cleavage over the welfare state, and ironically, more knowledge
leads to the aggravation of such cleavage.
Our study speaks to the extensive literature on the nexus between cognitive abilities and public
policy preferences (Bartels, 1996; Haushofer and Fehr, 2014; Kuziemko et al., 2015). More con-
cretely, we contribute to the literature examining how ignorance or misperception leads to the
misalignment between self-interest and redistributive preference. Our contribution is twofold.
First, recent studies on the misalignment focus on the biases in the assessment of inequality or of
one’s relative economic position in society. Yet, such biases in economic assessment are found to
be common across widely different societies (Engelhardt and Wagener, 2018; Fernández-Albertos
and Kuo, 2018; Howell and Howell, 2008; Karadja et al., 2017) and thus have limited explanatory
power in accounting for the cross-national variation in the social cleavages over welfare. We focus
instead on citizens’ knowledge of institutions. As discussed below, the level of the public’s knowl-
edge of welfare state institutions is expected to vary considerably depending on the maturity and
stability of the institutions.
Second, and related to the first point, unlike most existing studies that derived expectations and
conducted empirical tests in the context of mature welfare states in the West, we believe our argu-
ment is particularly relevant for societies where citizens have limited personal experience of con-
tributing to and receiving benefits from the welfare state and where welfare state-related issues are
yet to be highly politicized. With this motivation, we develop and test our argument in the context
of an emerging welfare state in Asia: South Korea (see the research design section for more details
about case justification). South Korea is considered to be a prototype Asian productivist/develop-
mental welfare state where social protection has long been subordinated to economic growth
(Haggard and Kaufman, 2008; Yang, 2013) and welfare state expansion has only recently been
given center stage in national politics.1 Given the dearth of studies on welfare attitudes conducted
outside Europe and North America, our findings from South Korea can offer new insights for
scholarship that seeks to understand the politics of the welfare state in a broader context.
As a preview, our analysis employing original survey data from South Korea lends support to
our argument. Similar to previous studies, our sample of 1804 Koreans confirms that there is no
income-based cleavage over social spending – whether it is universal, flat-rate spending or a nar-
rowly targeted spending only for the poor. We, however, find strong income-based cleavage among
a subset of knowledgeable respondents. Higher-income respondents aware of fiscal constraints and
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