Anthony Kevins

Loughborough University | Lough · School of Social Sciences and Humanities

To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on th...

Does neoliberalism lie behind the increased use of social policy to control and incentivize labour market behaviour? We argue that this assumed connection is theoretically weak and empirically inaccurate, and we point to an alternative explanation centred on government paternalism. Using a new comparative dataset on workfare reforms, we first descr...

Should those who would be disproportionately affected by a policy change have more influence on that reform than the average citizen? And does it matter whether the affected individuals stand to benefit or lose out from the proposed reform? Despite longstanding debates on proportionality, asymmetry, and affected interests in the democratic theory l...

When are voters more likely to project their own political position onto a candidate for office? We investigate this question by examining the assumed partisanship of a (self-declared) centrist politician, using data from a survey experiment fielded in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In doing so, we build on the social categoriza...

This chapter investigates to what extent, and under what conditions, labour market vulnerability may be an important factor shaping attitudes toward immigration. It begins by highlighting why labour market vulnerability might affect anti-immigrant sentiment, and why vulnerable workers might be especially sensitive to the size of the immigrant popul...

Does immigration naturally undermine public support for the welfare state? To what extent – and under what circumstances – should we expect to see such an effect? This chapter explores these questions by studying attitudes toward a Universal Basic Income (UBI), examining the interactive effects of education, employment status, and the size of the i...

Is labour market vulnerability associated with harsher preferences on asylum-seeking policy? If so, how might the size of the existing foreign-born population condition this effect? We unpack these dynamics across 20 European countries using 2014 ESS and EU-SILC data. In doing so, we examine the relevance of labour market vulnerability both directl...

Can public consultations—gatherings organised to solicit constituent opinions—reduce the blame attributed to elected representatives whose decisions end up backfiring? Using two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on nationally representative samples of US respondents, we examine whether the effectiveness of consultations as a blame avoidan...

Research suggests that voters use identity markers to infer information about candidates for office. Yet politicians have various markers that often point in conflicting directions, and it is unclear how citizens respond to competing signals-especially outside of a few highly stigmatized groups in the US. Given the relevance of these issues for ele...

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child...

Most legislation neither affects nor interests citizens equally. But should this variation in interest and affectedness impact who gets to influence policy reforms? This article examines US public opinion on this issue using a national survey experiment varying both the policy outcome (a bill's passage/failure) and the type of constituency input gr...

Most citizens agree that legislators should reflect their constituencies' stances. Yet constituents rarely speak in a single voice. Instead, constituents often vary not only in their policy preferences, but also in the degree to which a given policy impacts their lives. Politicians thus at times pursue targeted representation, offering increased in...

Recent years have seen an increase in concerns that labour market vulnerability and national economic performance might be interacting to foment more polarized opinions about immigration. This article uses European Social Survey and EU-SILC data from 23 countries to explore this potential relationship, examining attitudes about the economic impact...

This article contributes to the literature on party appeals to social groups by introducing a new dataset on group and policy appeals in Scandinavia (2009–2015). In addition to coding to what social groups parties appeal, we collected information on what policies parties offer for the groups they mention and what goals and instruments they specify...

While existing research highlights the feminized and devalued nature of care work, the relationship between care work and job satisfaction has not yet been tested cross-nationally. England (2005) provides two theoretical frameworks that guide our thinking about this potential relationship: the Prisoner of Love framework suggests that, notwithstandi...

This paper investigates how and why welfare state universalism can shape the integration of migrants into the national community. Universalism is broadly regarded as central to the integrative and solidarity-building potential of welfare states, but we argue that the traditional approach to understanding the concept is fraught with inconsistencies....

This article explores the moral politics of the welfare state and the social conflicts that underlie them. We argue that existing research on the moralism of redistributive and social policy preferences is overly one dimensional, with a longstanding concentration on attitudes toward welfare state beneficiaries. To widen our understanding of the phe...

Social class, with its potentially pivotal influence on both policy-making and electoral outcomes tied to the welfare state, is a frequent fixture in academic and political discussions about social policy. Yet these discussions presuppose that class identity is in fact tied up with distinct attitudes toward the welfare state. Using original data fr...

In studying how to best understand social program introduction, political scientists have built up a laundry list of contributory factors. We suggest, however, that “objective” problem pressure has been incorrectly neglected by many scholars in recent decades—and the well-known case of Germany’s nineteenth-century introduction of social insurance l...

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...

This article explores how preferences for redistribution among voters are affected by the structure of inequality. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that some voter segments matter more than others, not least the so-called median-income voter, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to directly analysing distinct income groups...

This article examines how labour market vulnerability and social policy interact to shape generalised trust. Building from the literature on dualisation, I suggest that: (1) labour market outsiders will have lower levels of generalised trust due to their increased risk exposure; and (2) active labour market policies, by conditioning labour market v...

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sor...

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP’s left–right scale to...

Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes...

In a post-industrial world in which employment is increasingly ‘non-standard’, the tying of benefit access to standard employment history in insurance-style programmes has created considerable insider–outsider welfare state divisions. This article investigates the factors shaping attempts to address this issue through the extension of benefit cover...