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Do increasing reform pressures change welfare state attitudes? An experimental study on population ageing, pension reform preferences, political knowledge and ideology
Abstract
It is a perennial issue in the public and the scientific debate whether increased pressures to reform due to the financial crisis or population ageing erode welfare state support. Surprisingly, our knowledge of how individuals change their attitudes in hard times is still limited – both theoretically and empirically. We rely on newly available data from a survey experiment in a representative German online survey and exogenously manipulate the perceived pressure to reform (due to an ageing society). We show that people indeed change their reform preferences when faced with an ageing society: the strong opposition to increasing the retirement age decreases. Further analyses reveal that not all groups within society react to increased reform pressures in the same way: political knowledge but also political partisanship do moderate the strength and the direction of the attitude change.
... However, the finding that aging is positively correlated with support for elderly programs is counterbalanced by contrasting evidence. Svallfors (2008), for instance, finds that age has little impact on preferences and that elderly-related programs are popular among all age groups, while Naumann (2017) shows that the salience of population aging increases popular support for welfare state retrenchment. Conversely, others demonstrate that though age-based policy conflicts do exist, generational conflict is not reinforced by population aging (Hess, Nauman, and Steinkopf 2017). ...
... Conversely, others demonstrate that though age-based policy conflicts do exist, generational conflict is not reinforced by population aging (Hess, Nauman, and Steinkopf 2017). Furthermore, many studies emphasize that aging affects policy preferences and policy priorities through other moderating factors such as policy areas, welfare regimes, electoral systems, one's value-orientation, individuals' political knowledge, and partisanship (Busemeyer, Goerres, and Weschle 2009;Jaime-Castillo 2013;Naumann 2017;Sciubba 2012;Svallfors 2008). ...
... In these places, as an age-based conflict is likely to be intensified with population graying, senior citizens' economic need and effort to work will be even more important to garner working-age people's support for old-age-related government programs. However, we acknowledge that the effect of population aging on policy preferences and priorities can vary across countries based on various factors such as existing welfare regimes, electoral systems, and one's value-orientation (Busemeyer, Goerres, and Weschle 2009;Jaime-Castillo 2013;Naumann 2017;Sciubba 2012). Therefore, considering these contextual and institutional factors is important in understanding the effect of population aging. ...
Deservingness theory contends that spending on the elderly is widely supported across age groups because, unlike other groups such as immigrants or the unemployed, senior citizens are perceived as morally worthy of social aid. However, through a survey experiment in Japan, a prototypical aging society, this study shows that in a state with a large population of senior citizens, there is a significant age gap in policy preferences with the working-age population demonstrating stronger opposition to government support for the elderly. To induce empathetic policy attitudes toward the elderly, therefore, effective issue framing is necessary. However, emphasizing economic need is not enough; it is only when both the elderly’s economic need and effort to work are emphasized that we see a positive attitudinal change among the working-age population. In addition, we find that the economically secure are more sensitive to senior citizens’ economic need and effort to work in determining their policy support. By contrast, the economically insecure exhibit unqualified support for the elderly. These findings demonstrate that deservingness for the elderly is not innate, but is driven by conditional altruism. Furthermore, our work emphasizes the importance of issue framing in generating intergenerational solidarity in a rapidly aging society.
... If preferences become strongly skewed along generational lines, say the working population prefers only pro-work policies while pensioners prefer only pro-old policies, there will be an intergenerational conflict in policy preferences. Although cross-sectional differences in age-related policy preferences between generations often are found to be small or insignificant (Ebbinghaus & Naumann, 2020;Emery, 2012;Hess, Naumann, & Steinkopf, 2017;Prinzen, 2015), population ageing and the pressure it is putting on limited welfare state resources could alter policy preferences and increase generational cleavages (Naumann, 2017;Tepe & Vanhuysse, 2009). ...
... Second, the extent or scope of the feedback can be 'general', that is, the effect of an entire welfare state or regime on individual preferences, or 'specific', that is, the effect of particular policies or policy changes on the attitudes towards those policies. Instead of analysing the specific policy feedback effects of certain reforms on attitudes towards those reforms (see, e.g., Fernández & Jaime-Castillo, 2013;Naumann, 2014;Naumann, 2017), the current study investigates how reform affects more general preferences for policies that benefit the old. These general preferences do not necessarily change through approval or disapproval of the reform itself, but because the policy change strengthens or weakens perceptions of self-interest or norms of deservingness, proportionality and trust in reciprocity. ...
... The term 'selfundermining' feedback is used for policies that create opposition to their continued provision. Retrenching pension reforms are commonly unpopular (Lynch & Myrskylä, 2009;Naumann, 2017) and likely to generate self-undermining feedback. It can be expected to translate into changes in preferences for pro-old policies in two opposing ways, depending on whether the reform addresses pension rights or pension duties (Ahn & Kim, 2014). ...
This study investigates how various types of pension reforms affect the age‐related policy preferences of different cohorts and whether they reinforce or undermine the generational welfare contract. It uses detailed descriptions from OECD Pensions at a Glance reports to create indicators for pension reforms in 18 European countries between 2008 and 2016. These indicators are combined with European Social Survey data from 2008 and 2016 to measure preferences towards welfare programmes that benefit the old compared to policies that benefit the working population and families with children. A difference‐in‐difference design is applied to test whether there are differences between reform and non‐reform countries and between cohorts. Pension reforms were found to be associated with stronger declines in pro‐old policy preferences in countries that raised the retirement age or introduced private pensions. The results show that although support for pro‐old welfare policies has declined in almost all countries, this has not necessarily undermined the generational welfare contract. Rather, there has been a re‐balancing of preferences towards policies that also favour other generations in other life‐course stages.
... Another related study using a survey experiment is Naumann (2017), who evaluates the impact of reform pressure on welfare state support in Germany from a political science perspective. ...
... We extend the experiment conducted by Naumann (2017) in two ways: First, we do not only inform respondents about the importance of demographic change, but also ask them about their prior beliefs, i.e. how they think the old-age to working-age ratio will develop. This allows us to analyze heterogeneous treatment effects based on prior beliefs. ...
Demographic change has an impact on pay-as-you-go pension systems. To maintain their financial sustainability, reforms are necessary, but often lack public support. Based on representative survey data from Germany, we conduct a survey experiment which allows investigating whether salience of or information about demographic change enhances preferences towards reforms in general as well as towards specific reform measures. We find that salience and information provision significantly increase the perceived reform necessity. Furthermore, salience increases preferences for an increase of the retirement age over other reform measures, while information provision reduces preferences for tax subsidies. In addition, we highlight the impact of prior beliefs on the treatment effects. As the salience and the information treatments barely differ, we conclude that it is not the information about the demographic change, which matters. Rather, being made aware of the challenges of the pension system impacts reform preferences. JEL-Codes: H550, J260, C900.
... Many women think that their jobs are not limited by too many physiological conditions and think that they should retire at the same age as men. Some people also think that with the increase of age, their physical condition is not as good as that of their young age, their working passion drops sharply, their working efficiency drops, and it is inappropriate to postpone their retirement age and so on [12]. Undoubtedly, the increasing number of elderly people, the expanding coverage of the pension system, a large number of "empty accounts" running personal accounts, the incipient fiscal deficit, the serious shortage of pension reserves, the gradually obvious "hidden debt," and the reform cost of the transition between the old and new systems have all increased the financial payment crisis [13]. ...
... . (12) e replacement rate of personal account pension is ...
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the issue of aging has gained international attention. Both developed and developing nations are currently dealing with this issue. To ensure the sustained and healthy growth of the economy and society in the face of an aging society, it is especially important to establish a scientific old-age insurance system and a reasonable retirement system. We are all aware that the key indicators for the state to control the old-age insurance system in the old-age insurance system are the income and expenditure balance of the old-age insurance pooling account and the analysis of the ideal retirement age. In this paper, a better machine algorithm is used. By independently learning the rules present in a large amount of data and gaining new experience and knowledge, machine learning (ML) can increase computer intelligence and give computers decision-making abilities comparable to those of humans. In general, a machine learning algorithm uses the laws it derives from data to predict unknown data after automatically analysing the data. This study’s findings suggest that the ideal retirement age and life expectancy are positively correlated, with the ideal retirement age’s growth rate 12.57 percent higher than that of life expectancy.
... Moreover, respondents might be willing to accept retrenchment in one area of the welfare state if they have a strong priority to expand spending in other areas of the welfare state [14]). A higher retirement age might be acceptable if this ensures that pension benefit levels remain stable [15]. In this paper, we add to these recent trends in welfare attitudes research and explore whether people engage in trade-offs between welfare state spending and redistribution on the one hand and tax increases on the other. ...
... Moreover, previous research has identified several other individual characteristics, which are correlated with income or political ideology, but also with support for the welfare state [1,5,14,15]. Therefore, we use gender, age in three age categories (below 35, 36-59, and 60 years and over), education (low, middle, and highest level of school education), and employment status (in work, retired, unemployed, other (i.e., in education, doing housework, on leave)) as further control variables in the multivariate analysis. ...
The aim of this paper is to explore whether support for the welfare state is lower if people are made aware of its costs. Using data from a series of survey experiments in the German Internet Panel, we analyse individual spending preferences for different areas of the welfare state and support for redistribution. Tax constraints lead to lower support for unemployment benefits and for redistribution. Tax constraints do not affect support for more spending on pensions, healthcare, and long-term care. We consider whether the effect of tax constraints varies with pre-existing political attitudes or with individual material circumstances. We find little evidence that a political ideology makes respondents more responsive to tax constraints. However, we find some support that low income respondents are less responsive to the tax constraint and maintain their high support despite its costs. Attitudes towards the welfare state are not independent of attitudes towards taxation, and we conclude that our understanding of public attitudes might considerably benefit from combining these different strands of the literature.
... Whereas the self-interest perspective predicts a generational conflict over welfare spending, the values perspective assumes that intergenerational solidarity will attenuate such a conflict. Previous research strongly suggests that the socio-economic and institutional context also shapes individual preference formation (Svallfors 1997, Jaeger 2013, Naumann 2016 and that the strength of the two rival mechanisms of attitude formation, self-interest and values, depend on the socio-economic context. We depict arguments why population ageing might increase the generational conflict and discuss the potential of active ageing policies to moderate the generational conflict. ...
... A dominant perspective in this debate is to link the generational conflict to the demographic aspect of population ageing only (Busemeyer et al. 2009, Emery 2012, Naumann 2016. Recently the policy oriented debate started to focus on the potential of population ageing and to stress the opportunities policy makers have to shape the process of population ageing. ...
In the scientific and the public debate demographic ageing is sometimes perceived as an unstoppable “grey tide” which will inevitably lead to a conflict between the old and young generation. In this paper we empirically evaluate whether we find any evidence for an intergenerational conflict in Europe and which factors might influence its severity. In particular, we answer the following questions. (1) Is there a conflict between the interests of the younger and the older generation? (2) Does the strength of the conflict increase with population ageing? And finally, (3) can a policy of Active Ageing, i.e. better integrating older generations into society, moderate the conflict? We answer these questions in a comparative study of 27 European countries using data from the Eurobarometer 2009. Our results show a moderate conflict between generations. Compared to spending preferences of the younger generation, older people are more likely to support increased spending for old age at the expense of educational spending. Contrary to expectation, generational conflict does not increase with population ageing. Linking country differences in the strength of the generational conflict to the degree of population ageing with multilevel regression techniques we do not find any evidence that the conflict is increasing In a final step of our analysis we evaluate the potential of generational policies - measured with the Active Aging Index - to mitigate the generational conflict. Intergenerational conflict is weaker when older people actively participate in the political life and are visible in society, suggesting Active Aging policies as a means to mitigate intergenerational conflict
... First, welfare knowledge is an entry point to citizens' understanding of the policy context, which can shape the public debate on social policies (Taylor-Gooby et al., 2003: 2). Despite contradictory results in the literature on the effect of knowledge on policy attitudes (Barnes et al., 2018), there is evidence to suggest that enhanced availability of knowledge of the policy context has the power to change the policy preferences of less knowledgeable people (Naumann, 2017). In other words, citizens' lack of knowledge about the policy context might lead them to hold political views different from those they would adopt otherwise (Gilens, 2001). ...
Social policy research examining citizens' welfare knowledge, which offers a gateway to their understanding of the policy context, has remained limited. Adapting the opportunity motivation ability framework borrowed from the literature on political knowledge to welfare knowledge, this article offers an analysis of new data from a nationwide survey to explore Turkish society's knowledge of the composition of public social spending. Corroborating earlier findings in the literature, the article maintains that most people in Turkey overestimate the relative size of social assistance spending for the poor. However, different from previous findings, the majority and most pensioners are also ill-informed about the rank of public spending on old-age pensions, the most widely used social benefit absorbing the largest share of welfare spending. The article provides evidence of the social division of welfare knowledge in Turkish society based mostly on three opportunity-related variables: city of residence, gender and income.
... Therefore, the bulk of research focuses on economic and political impacts of the reform, especially cost-benefit analysis associated with the proposed arrangements as well as the political repercussions (Asher, 2000;Asher & Deepa, 2004;Lee & Jung, 2018;Palacios & Whitehouse, 2006;Sakamoto, 2011). Some scholars investigate citizens' attitudes towards pension reform (Calzada & del Pino, 2008;Fernández & Jaime-Castillo, 2012;Naumann, 2017). ...
Although pension reform has been a global trend in the last couple of decades, public administration research has seldom addressed the issue of how targeted pension reforms affect civil servants. The goal of this study is to conceptualize pension reform as the breach of the psychological contract between the government and civil servants and to understand whether it leads to the experience of regret in civil servants over choosing a government career. In doing so, this study also explores the possible role of public service motivation (PSM) in moderating the experience of regret elicited by psychological contract breach as well as the negative perception of the pension reform. The analysis of the data collected from 944 Taiwanese public employees shows that (i) both psychological contract breach and negative perception trigger regret and (ii) PSM strengthens the impacts of psychological contract breach and the negative perception of the pension reform. The findings have critical implications for both practitioners handling pension reforms and researchers interested in building a theory of PSM.
... Furthermore, short-term retrenchment might be acceptable when it ensures the functioning of the economy and contributes to the long-term existence of the welfare state. Hence, people accept cutbacks in order to be protected in the future (Naumann, 2017). On the other hand, research showed that if expanding social investment policies goes along cutbacks in other parts of the welfare state, benefits of social investment policies are not strong enough to outweigh the benefits of social protection policies due to their diffuse nature (see Busemeyer and Garritzmann, 2017). ...
... Welfare attitudes are important in that they reflect citizens as social members' social needs and they legitimize government responsibility for social welfare (Blekesaune and Quadagno 2003;Brooks and Manza 2006;Naumann 2017;Yang et al. 2019). As social policy is an important tool for the government to exert its control and relieve class conflicts, clarifying the relationship between welfare attitudes and social policy continues to be an important scholarly commitment for social scientists and politicians sparing no efforts to pursue (Yang et al. 2019;Wong et al. 2009). ...
Public attitudes towards welfare programs is a crucial topic in the field of social policy research. Current studies on welfare attitudes has long been a lack of an explicit conceptualization, and mainly conducted at the individual level with the focus on self-interest. This study distinguished the dimensions of welfare attitudes into responsibility, efficiency and effectiveness, and examined the factors that influence welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policies in China. Data used in this study came from Chinese National Survey of Public Welfare Attitudes in 2018 with a final sample size of 8296 respondents from three deliberately selected provinces in China. It concluded that welfare attitudes share the traits of economical individualism, social collectivism and institutional differences. Positive perception of work ethics and social cognition about income inequality were two important factors associated with welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policy. People who were against indolence, idleness and male breadwinner and who were highly sensitive of income inequality were more supportive of the notion that government is responsible for protecting their livelihood, nevertheless, less satisfied with the current standard of substance allowance and performance of policy implementation, indicating an orientation of both individualism and collectivism of welfare attitudes. Besides, welfare attitudes were also motivated by institutional differences such as regional disparities and migrant identity. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should be need-oriented in dealing with of the different dimensions of poverty, and should establish a more unified and generous social welfare system that benefits both the natives and migrants.
... Individuals who were certain about their future MPF income were more likely to support increasing MPF contributions (H5b). This finding was among the strongest statistically (odds ratio: 2.42) and is consistent with the literature that argues a lack of information regarding the MPF scheme, such as the estimated accrued savings at retirement age and what is a sufficient amount of retirement savings, may be one of the major reasons for opposition to MPF reform (Boeri and Tabellini, 2012;Naumann, 2017). It is not clear why a lack of confusion with the MPF was not associated with support for increases in MPF contributions as predicted (H5a). ...
This article examines public attitudes towards two reform options for the defined-contribution (DC) Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme in Hong Kong: (i) increasing MPF contributions; or (ii) introducing a universal pension partly funded by switching MPF contributions to the universal pension. Drawing on a phone survey conducted with 975 active contributors to the MPF, we examine whether agreement with these MPF reform options can be explained by respondents’ self-interest, attachment to different welfare ideologies, their level of confusion with the MPF, uncertainty about future MPF income, and trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues. This research identifies that it is uncertainty with future MPF income and low trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues that have the most significant effect on respondents’ MPF reform preferences. Mainstream accounts of the effect of liberalist, universalist, conservative, and familistic welfare ideologies are only partially confirmed.
... This study also helps to improve our understanding of the potential variations in citizens' demands for public old-age support. In light of the rapidly increasing financial burden of maintaining the welfare of the elderly in an era of population aging (Bengtsson and Scott 2011;Hsieh and Tung 2016), the manner in which ordinary citizens allocate eldercare responsibilities is highly relevant for anticipating potential older-support pressure on both public institutions and future generations (Aysan and Beaujot 2009;Naumann 2017). ...
China’s large aging population poses grim challenges to eldercare provision. Against the background of withering traditional kinship-based eldercare and increasing significance of government-sponsored support programs, this study draws on data from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey to investigate not only the correlation between the sense of social injustice and the preference of allocating eldercare responsibilities between public and private agents, but also how this correlation varies between urban and rural regions. We find that perceived social injustice is significantly correlated with the odds of designating the government, instead of family members, to shoulder eldercare responsibilities. Further mediation analysis suggests that this correlation is mediated through concerns about eldercare. On average, the link between perceived social injustice and preference of eldercare duty allocation is weaker in rural than in urban China. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.
... 70 Soss and Schram 2007. 71 Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Naumann 2014. ...
Welfare states are exposed to a host of cost-inducing ‘reform pressures’. An experiment implemented in Germany, Norway and Sweden tests how various reform pressure frames affect perceptions about the future financial sustainability of the welfare state. Such perceptions have been shown to moderate electoral punishment for welfare reform, but little is known about their origins. Hypotheses are formulated in dialogue with newer research on welfare state change, as well as with older theory expecting more stability in policy and attitudes (the ‘new politics’ framework). Research drawing on ‘deservingness theory’ is also consulted. The results suggest large variations in impact across treatments. The most influential path to effective pressure framing is to ‘zoom in’ on specific economic pressures linked to undeserving groups (above all immigration, but also to some extent low employment). Conversely, a message emphasizing pressure linked to a very deserving group (population aging) had little effect. A second conceivable path to pressure framing entails ‘zooming out’ – making messages span a diverse and more broadly threatening set of challenges. This possibility, however, received weaker support.
... With decreasing fertility rates and increasing life expectancy, Germany is one of the fastest aging countries in the world, and predictions show that the share of people aged 65 and older will increase from 21 percent in 2010 to 28 percent in 2030 [1]. The welfare state's financial sustainability is under pressure due to a growing number of beneficiaries and less contributors, and in particular, the public pension system is expected to face severe economic problems [2][3][4][5][6]. In reaction, German policy makers have introduced several far-reaching reforms with the aim of increasing the retirement age and, thus, relieve the pension system of financial pressure: They lifted the statutory retirement age from 65 to 67 [7], introduced training programs for older workers [8], and abolished early retirement pathways [9,10]. ...
In the last 20 years, German policy makers have reformed the pension system and the labor market with the aim of prolonging working life. As a consequence, older workers' employment rate and average retirement age rose. In addition to the actual behavior of today's retiree cohorts, the reforms also influence the expected retirement age of future pensioners, the development of which will be investigated in this paper, arguing that they have adapted to the reforms and increased their expected retirement age. The analyses are based on data from the SOEP and DEAS survey and results show an increase of the expected retirement age. However, while high-skilled workers both want and expect to retire late, low-skilled workers prefer to retire early but expect that they have to work longer in order to ensure a reasonable pension. This finding hints at rising social inequality in the transition from work to retirement.
... Using survey experiments, Slothuus (2007) and Petersen et al. (2011), for instance, show that framing recipients as undeserving ("lazy") makes people less supportive of generous welfare state benefits. Similarly, Wenzelburger and Hörisch (2016) and Naumann (2017) find that people become more accepting of cuts if they are framed as economic necessities. And in a related strand of research, authors such as Lergetporer et al. (2016) and Stanley and Hartman (2017) have shown how information about how much is spent on the welfare stateand whether undeserving groups get a comparably large share of that spendingaffect public preferences. ...
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.
A promising approach to pension policy preferences focuses on the influence of policy related information. We advance this research programme by examining the impact of information about future pension benefits, including whether information effects occur through priming, learning or both. Drawing on a novel, split-sample survey experiment in the US, Germany and Spain, we examine the impact of information on forecasted pension replacement rates for 2040 on pension policy attitudes. Findings indicate that the information treatment increases support for the two outcomes considered: (i) increases in the pensionable age and (ii) greater spending on pensions relative to other social programmes. Analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects accounting for prior beliefs of participants show that information effects occur both through priming and learning. The study concludes that hard, non-partisan information increases support for reforms that foster the financial sustainability of pension systems, although the scope of information effects depends on contextual conditions.
Who reacts politically to fiscally costly immigration? A political economy tradition holds that reactions depend on economic self-interest, whereas a social psychology tradition emphasizes generalized political orientations and trust. Past work largely leans in favor of the latter tradition. We make three contributions. First, our dependent variable is a concrete perception of welfare state sustainability, arguably better suited to capture self-interest. Second, both the political economy- and social psychology traditions have been studied narrowly; we separate between multiple interests (including economic local context), and compare several types of trust orientations. Third, we use machine learning methods well-suited to analyze treatment heterogeneity in a randomized survey experiment. We find support for both interest-based and social psychological explanations. As for the latter, what matters is not only, or even mainly, orientations/trust related to immigration. Rather, generalized political distrust strongly regulates when costly immigration cues trigger welfare sustainability worries.
This study aims to elucidate the structure of support for social policies (redistribution and free competition), focusing on the role of community interests (especially demographic decline). To this end, Japan was selected as a case study because it has the highest proportion of the elderly population in the world. The author analyzed data from the National Survey of Social Stratification and Social Mobility in 2015 and the Population Census for the same year, employing ordered logit models. The results revealed that people living in demographically declining communities were more likely to support redistribution and less likely to endorse free competition, compared to individuals from other communities. Furthermore, compared to the underprivileged, wealthy individuals were more likely to consider community interests irrespective of individual benefits. This finding demonstrates that community interests may have a significant influence on individuals’ policy preferences.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a vast increase in the demand for fast, frequent, and multi-faceted data to study the impact of the pandemic on people’s lives. Existing data collection infrastructures had to be adapted quickly during the early phase of the pandemic to meet this data demand. Our research group contributed to this by conducting the Mannheim Corona Study (MCS), a longitudinal probability-based online survey, in a daily rotating panel design that took place from March 20 through July 10, 2020. The fast-and-frequent panel data collection design of the MCS had numerous consequences for designing its questionnaires and choosing its measurement instruments. This included designing new instruments on the fly in the ever-changing pandemic environment, making efficient use of limited questionnaire space, and deciding on measurement frequencies in a structured manner under uncertain external conditions. In this report, we document the MCS approach to choosing measurement instruments fit for the purpose of fast and frequent data collection during the early phase of COVID-19 in Germany. We particularly highlight three examples of measurement instruments in the MCS and reflect on their measurement properties.
This study is a systematic analysis of the current debate in leading English-language journals about the future of social policy in an aging society. Pension systems have been reformed in most European countries in recent decades, but there are types of reforms that can shift the burden of aging to other generations. If the benefits and costs of these reforms affect generations’ perceptions of social policy in different ways, then pension reform can be used as a tool to improve not only public finances, but also intergenerational solidarity. The investigation of the relationship between different types of pension reforms and social justice is one of the tasks of this study. One of the main challenges was to understand whether the changes in social policy could intensify or reduce the conflicts between generations. The results showed that the support for social policy, which is mainly aimed at older people, has declined in most European countries, although the vast majority of people believe that the state should provide a reasonable standard of living for older people. Support for the elderly declined more in the countries that raised the retirement age and introduced multi-pillar pensions. At the same time, a well-functioning intergenerational welfare pact is not only about ensuring the well-being of older people. It is also a preference for policies that support the working population and those under working age. The rebalancing of the intergenerational welfare pact can provide a solid foundation for an adequate pension policy.
Objectives
This study reports the findings of the first cross-national survey experiment on the effects of information on the expected retirement age. Given the drawbacks of unrealistic retirement expectations, the study examines the impacts of nonpartisan information about future demographic aging and forecasted pension benefit levels.
Methods
An online survey experiment was conducted in the US, Germany and Spain in 2018 using an internet access panel. We assigned respondents to two random treatments: one citing the change in the projected share of the population older than 65 years (demographic treatment) and another citing the projected change in pension replacement rates (benefits treatment), both for 2015 to 2040. Treatment effects on the expected retirement age are reported.
Results
The benefits treatment has a strong influence on retirement expectations. In the US, respondents informed of the expected decline in pension replacement rates expect to retire two years later than respondents not informed of the decline. In Spain, this treatment leads to an approximately 9-month postponement of expected retirement, while no significant effect is found in Germany. In addition, the demographic treatment does not affect retirement expectations in the countries studied. Respondents in all countries informed of future population aging do not show different expected retirement ages than respondents not given this information.
Discussion
People’s retirement expectations are sensitive to information on future changes in pension generosity but not to information on population aging. The results suggest information campaigns focused on declining pension replacement rates may help extend working lives.
The legitimacy of a pension system or any social security program depends on its credibility and perceived fairness. In order to gauge this legitimacy, we need to understand the relation between people's knowledge and attitudes. This experimental survey into the role of knowledge and perceptions divided respondents into two groups: the ‘treatment’ group received an information letter about a forthcoming pension reform before they were interviewed, while the control group was interviewed without receiving this ‘treatment’. Comparisons of the responses from the two groups allow us to assess how the level of knowledge and the provision of information affect people's opinions on policy reform. We also consider the patterns of covariation between background factors, people's concerns, and attitudes toward pension reform. The results show that the information letter had a significant impact on subjective but not on the objective level of knowledge. Receiving the information letter improved acceptance and perceptions of the fairness of the reform.
Momentous events in Western democracies have brought renewed attention to how various aspects of government-controlled policy outputs and outcomes affect citizens’ trust in politics. Unlike most previous research, this study uses individual-level panel data to test the link between government performance evaluations and political trust. Moreover, it gauges performance in more policy areas than previous research, including key aspects of government-controlled social services as well as a wide range of economic risks. The study finds that evaluations of government performance affect political trust but that the evidence is stronger for evaluations of social protection than for economic risks. Crucially, the analysis suggests that the relationship between performance evaluations and distrust is reciprocal. The relationship may be described as a ‘downbound spiral’ where dissatisfied groups develop distrust, which in turn makes for a more pessimistic interpretation of economic risks and welfare state performance.
As a response to the ageing population, the United Kingdom (UK) government, like many
others, has increased the State Pension Age. This has involved equalising women’s State
Pension Age with men’s, raising it from 60 to 65, with further increases already underway.
It has been argued that a key issue with how this change has been implemented is the lack
of notice the government gave to the women affected, impacting on their ability to plan for
retirement. So far, there has been very little research exploring inequalities in awareness of
these developments and, in particular, considering whether women of particular socioeconomic
backgrounds are less likely to know about the changes. This has implications
for potentially further widening inequalities in old age. In this paper we analyse data
from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. We consider the role of cognitive ability
in mediating the relationship between socio-economic background and awareness, given
recent debates on deficiencies in financial literacy. We find that socio-economic inequalities
exist, especially with respect to labour force status, occupation and education. We also
find that cognitive ability, especially numeracy, mediates a sizeable proportion of the relationship.
These findings have important implications in terms of implementing future
policy changes and awareness campaigns to help mitigate the possibility that they will further
entrench inequalities in older age.
This chapter examines how confidence in pensions across Europe changed between 2004 and 2009 and explores whether problem pressures such as population ageing or the financial crisis led to an erosion of confidence in pensions. Moreover, it examined whether there are some institutional designs and pension reforms that are able to foster trust. The results confirm the general expectation that problem pressures lead to lower confidence in pensions. Moreover, retrenchment and restructuring rather erode than foster confidence in pensions. Finally, at the individual level, a good economic situation is correlated with higher confidence in pensions, whereas unemployment risks and insecure career prospects are linked to lower confidence. The study does not find evidence that political parties or trade unions influence their members’ confidence in pensions.
The possibility of upcoming intergenerational conflict in an aging society is a recurrent topic in scholarly and public debate. However, do old and young people really have opposing political preferences? We give a theoretical as well as an empirical answer to this question. Game theoretical modelling leads us to the conclusion that both old and young people might be expected to favor intergenerational redistribution, but also that aging within society might heighten the possibility of generational conflict. Empirical analyses based on survey data from twenty-seven EU member states reveal a rather weak conflict status. We find a small intergenerational difference in regard to preferences for governmental spending on education and pensions. Old people as compared to young people have a slight preference for a policy favoring old people. We do not find evidence that aging intensifies intergenerational conflict. Our results suggest that intergenerational conflict could be mitigated by adopting an active policy on aging.
The ongoing privatization of pensions-the shift from state to private responsibility for old age retirement income-raises fundamental issues of social and participatory rights. While pay-as-you-go-financed public pension systems face sustainability problems due to an ageing society, the recent financial crisis reveals the problematic nature of funded private pensions that fall short of expected returns. What have been the experiences in developed multipillar systems in providing adequate pensions for all? What can be learned for those pension systems currently under reform? This edited book compares the varieties of pension governance in ten European countries. It contrasts the experience of developed multipillar systems such as Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland with emerging multipillar systems in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden as well as the still dominantly Bismarckian social insurance systems of Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy. Each of the ten country chapters investigates how and why old age income responsibilities have been shifted from the state to employers, unions, and individuals. The country experts first describe the changing public-private pension mix and then discuss the particular features of the private (occupational and personal) pensions. They answer four major questions: who is covered, what kind of benefits, who pays, and who governs private pensions? In addition, three comparative analyses review the long-term institutional change from public to multipillar pension systems, map the cross-national variations in regulation and governance of private pensions, and investigate the consequences for old age income inequality in Europe.
The paper looks into the processes and outcomes of setting-up and maintaining a probability-based longitudinal online survey, which is recruited face-to-face and representative of both the online and offline population aged 16 to 75 in Germany. This German Internet Panel (GIP) studies political and economic attitudes and reform preferences through bi-monthly longitudinal online interviews of individuals. The results presented demonstrate that a carefully designed and implemented online panel can produce high-quality data at lower marginal costs than existing panels that operate solely in face-to-face mode. Analyses into the representativeness of the online sample showed no major coverage or nonresponse biases. Finally, including offline households in the panel is important as it improves the representation of the older and female segments of the population.
A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant understandings of over-time communication effects. Allowing individuals to choose information themselves—a common situation on many political issues—leads to the preeminence of early frames and the rejection of later frames. Instead of opinion decay, we find dogmatic adherence to opinions formed in response to the first frame to which participants were exposed (i.e., staunch opinion stability). The effects match those that occur when early frames are repeated multiple times. The results suggest that opinion stability may often reflect biased information seeking. Moreover, the findings have implications for a range of topics including the micro–macro disconnect in studies of public opinion, political polarization, normative evaluations of public opinion, the role of inequality considerations in the debate about health care, and, perhaps most importantly, the design of experimental studies of public opinion.
Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: the parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps a more fundamental question: has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place, and if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements over substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those – less substantively grounded – opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
'Active ageing' is a topic of increasing attention in scientific and policy discussions on ageing, yet there is no consensus on its actual meaning. The current paper proposes a detailed classification of various definitions that have been used since its introduction. These definitions are subjected to critical investigation, and subtle differences with regard to such terms as 'healthy ageing' and 'productive ageing' are clarified. Bearing the hazards of previous definitions in mind, a comprehensive strategy is initiated. Given that earlier definitions have tended to exclude frail older adults, this strategy pays particular attention to the translation of the active-ageing concept to situations of dependency by centring on three key principles: fostering adaptability, supporting the maintenance of emotionally close relationships and removing structural barriers related to age or dependency.
Rising levels of income inequality in almost all industrialized countries as a consequence of globalization and de-industrialization might lead one to assume that voters will demand more redistribution and exert influence on their governments to set up redistributive programmes. However, this is not always the case. Citizens do not react directly to actual levels of inequality, as research on the attitudes towards inequality and redistribution has shown. In this article the complex relation between cross-national variation of inequality and public support for redistribution is analysed. The article draws on explanations from both a political economy perspective as well as drawing on comparative welfare regime research. While the former conceives cross-national variations in support for redistribution as the aggregate effect of a demand of rational actors reacting to country context, the latter focuses on the impact of institutions and culture superimposing itself over self-interest. The empirical analysis tests the explanations of both the political economy and welfare regimes approach. Since the article focuses on the impact of context variables on individual attitudes, a multilevel analysis is adopted. Data are taken from the 1999 ‘International Social Survey Program’ and are complemented by macro-economic variables. Based on the results, a model of contingent support for redistribution is put forward, where culturally influenced definitions are embedded in economic processes.
Recent studies of how European welfare systems are responding to current pressures agree that welfare states display remarkable resilience. They are being reformed rather than dismantled. New policies are concerned to contain costs and to promote activation, stressing the contribution of welfare to economic competitiveness. Will people support cost constraint? This paper analyses attitude survey data from the 1980s and 1990s to show that approval of the main welfare services is high, but, in contrast to the findings of earlier studies, there is now some evidence of declining support. Attitudes are not structured according to the accounts of the ‘new politics’ of welfare (which imply that each regime will produce its own pattern of interests in relation to the groups whose interests are entrenched by current arrangements) but reflect broad lines of income, age and gender, cross-cutting national differences. There is little support for cuts in social services, but an equally low level of willingness to pay the extra taxes and social contributions required to maintain current standards of provision in the face of rising pressures on welfare. An agenda of activation is likely to prove more acceptable politically than one of cost constraint in all regimes. The implication is that European welfare states face a straitened future, between increasing demands and constrained resources, which may lead public opinion support to dwindle further.
Social policy research often depends on the application of generalisations from social science. Questions like ‘what works?’ assume that general principles can be translated from specific examples into other contexts. Pawson and Tilley argue that effective policy research has to depend on the idea of a ‘generative mechanism’, or relationships of cause and effect. Explaining issues in terms of causes, however, is problematic. Social phenomena tend to be multifaceted, and even relatively simple phenomena are likely to be influenced by a range of different factors; causal analyses have to be developed by interpretation, and the analyses are frequently wrong. Causal explanations often claim to do more than they can deliver: even if there is a convincing causal explanation, it does not necessarily imply any prescription for policy. There are ways of generalising, however, that do not depend on causal analysis. Phronesis develops principles experientially, setting them against empirical evidence, and it does not need to consider underlying mechanisms to be effective. Phronesis provides the basis for a critique of technocratic approaches, a rationale for action and a focus for the development of alternative methods and approaches. A dependence on phronesis cannot avoid all of the pitfalls associated with generalisation, but it is more flexible, and less presumptuous, than a causal approach.
This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age.
All three of the traditionally recognized new institutionalisms – rational choice, historical, and sociological – have increasingly sought to ‘endogenize’ change, which has often meant a turn to ideas and discourse. This article shows that the approaches of scholars coming out of each of these three institutionalist traditions who take ideas and discourse seriously can best be classified as part of a fourth ‘new institutionalism’ – discursive institutionalism (DI) – which is concerned with both the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse in institutional context. It argues that this newest of the ‘new institutionalisms’ has the greatest potential for providing insights into the dynamics of institutional change by explaining the actual preferences, strategies, and normative orientations of actors. The article identifies the wide range of approaches that fit this analytic framework, illustrating the ways in which scholars of DI have gone beyond the limits of the traditional institutionalisms on questions of interests and uncertainty, critical junctures and incremental change, norms and culture. It defines institutions dynamically – in contrast to the older neo-institutionalisms’ more static external rule-following structures of incentives, path-dependencies, and cultural framing – as structures and constructs of meaning internal to agents whose ‘background ideational abilities’ enable them to create (and maintain) institutions while their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them to communicate critically about them, to change (or maintain) them. But the article also points to areas for improvement in DI, including the theoretical analysis of processes of ideational change, the use of the older neo-institutionalisms for background information, and the incorporation of the power of interests and position into accounts of the power of ideas and discourse.
This paper tests contested arguments within the institutionalist literature about the relation between institutional and attitudinal changes, using the reunified Germany as a case. Eastern Germany constitutes a case approaching a ‘natural experiment’ for the social sciences, being twice the receiver of externally imposed institutions. It, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to closely analyse institutional effects on attitudes, as in this particular case, the time order of institutional and attitudinal changes can actually be decided. Using data from the International Social Survey Program modules on ‘The Role of Government’ (1990, 1996, and 2006), attitudes towards government responsibilities are compared in Eastern and Western Germany, and to other countries. Results show a considerable convergence in attitudes between Eastern and Western Germany – attitudes in Western Germany are completely stable while attitudes in Eastern Germany become, overtime, more similar to those found in the West. Furthermore, comparisons of different birth cohorts show that while considerable attitude differences between Eastern and Western Germany are still found in 2006 among those who had their forming experiences before the fall of the wall, differences are virtually nil among those who were still children in 1989. In summary, the analysis provides strong support for the attitude-forming effects of institutions, and a clear vindication of institutional theories. It also points to generational replacement as a key mechanism in translating institutional change into attitudinal change.
A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies, as well as scholars investigating institutional influences on individual welfare attitudes, find empirical evidence to support both relationships. While a relationship in both directions is plausible, scholars have yet to thoroughly investigate the mutual relationship between these two. Consequently, we still do not know under which circumstances welfare institutions invoke public approval of welfare policies and under which circumstances public opinion drives welfare policy. Taking a quantitative approach to public opinion and welfare state policies in the Netherlands, this paper addresses this issue in an attempt to increase our understanding of welfare state legitimacy. The results show that individual opinions influence relatively new policies, policies which are not yet fully established and where policy designs are still evolving and developing. Social policy, on the other hand, is found to influence individual opinions on established and highly institutionalised policies, but does not influence individual opinions in relatively new areas of social policy.
Democracies, and the citizenries that stand at their center, are not natural phenomena; they are made and sustained through politics. Government policies can play a crucial role in this process, shaping the things publics believe and want, the ways citizens view themselves and others, and how they understand and act toward the political system. Yet, while political scientists have said a great deal about how publics influence policies, they know far less about the ways policies influence publics. In this article, we seek to clarify how policies, once enacted, are likely to affect political thought and action in the citizenry. Such effects are hard to locate within the standard framework of approaches to mass behavior, and they are generally ignored by program evaluators and policy analysts. To bridge this gap, we direct attention toward a long and vibrant, but underappreciated, line of inquiry we call the “political tradition” of mass behavior research. Drawing this tradition together with recent work on “policy feedback,” we outline a framework for thinking about how policies influence mass politics. The major types of such effects include defining membership; forging political cohesion and group divisions; building or undermining civic capacities; framing policy agendas, problems, and evaluations; and structuring, stimulating, and stalling political participation.
Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experi-ments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experi-ments in political science and highlight a range of difficulties, some of which have straightfor-ward solutions within the survey-experimental approach and some of which can be dealt with only by exercising greater caution in interpreting findings and bringing to bear alterna-tive strategies of research.
Can changing economic conditions predict changes in public attitudes towards welfare state policies? More specifically, does
public support for governmental provision and economic redistribution increase in periods of economic strain and low employment?
This has been a popular hypothesis among political commentators but has been subject of limited empirical scrutiny. The hypothesis
is tested using data from three waves of the World Values Survey and fixed effects models at country level following cross-sectional
analyses at the level of respondents which control for individual characteristics. The hypothesis is supported by three out
of four effects being tested. These effects are largely contextual as individual level compositional effects can only explain
a minor part. The results also indicate that the formation of public opinion towards welfare state policies is predictable
and rational.
We examine how people evaluate a series of competing political messages received over the course of a campaign or policy debate. Instead of assuming a message has a fixed effect, we emphasize the variable effect of a message depending on when it is received in relation to other messages. We present data from two experiments showing there are critical differences in the psychology of framing between static and dynamic contexts. Competition between messages received concurrently tends to lead to cancellation of framing effects. However, when competing messages are received sequentially, individuals typically give disproportionate weight to the most recent frame, as the accessibility of earlier arguments decays over time. Therefore, framing effects on political preferences are unlikely to be negated simply by democratic competition. Recent messages, however, do not dominate for all individuals. Biases in how people evaluate competing messages over time vary across individuals depending on how they process information. Some individuals, owing to motivational or contextual factors, are more likely to process information in a manner that generates strong attitudes that endure. As hypothesized, individuals in our experiments who formed stronger attitudes when processing information gave greater weight to the first randomly assigned message they encountered in a sequence of messages, while individuals who formed weaker attitudes favored the last randomly assigned message they received. In the former case, competition over time produced primacy effects rather than balancing, and in the latter case, competition over time produced recency effects. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the power of communications in contemporary politics.
The societal effects of the welfare state are a perennial issue in the public debate. Critics accuse the welfare state of having unintended economic and moral consequences rather than producing its intended social goals. Popular perceptions of possible consequences of the welfare state are a crucial component of welfare state legitimacy, but have received hardly any scholarly attention. Using the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, we analyse how European citizens perceive the consequences of the welfare state, whether perceived positive consequences outweigh the negative consequences, and to what extent consequence perceptions are determined by individual and country-level factors. The conclusion is that the European public has a clearer eye for the positive social than for negative economic and moral consequences. Moreover, at the individual level these perceptions are mainly influenced by ideational factors, while they are affected by welfare state generosity at the country level. Interestingly, in more developed welfare states the public perceives the negative, as well as the positive consequences more strongly.
In the coming decades, the importance of the older worker for the Dutch labour market will become apparent as the population ageing process progresses. Extending working careers may turn out to be a double dividend for welfare states like the Netherlands as it can prevent drastic cuts in benefits or large increases in pension contributions. The average Dutch worker, however, has a double standard when considering the prospect of working longer: while agreeing that working longer may well become necessary, workers do not think it will apply to them personally. Two structural impediments may explain this ambivalence and the low labour force participation of older workers: (1) stereotypes of older workers held by both employers and employees and (2) attitudes towards working longer are sensitive to the business cycle. Whereas solidarity with older workers seems to be a principle that holds true in good times, in times of recession other rules apply. The Geneva Papers (2005) 30, 693–710. doi:10.1057/palgrave.gpp.2510045
An opinion poll on a representative sample of Italian citizens suggests that it does. We focus on reforms that would lengthen retirement age and/or cut pension benefits. After controlling for individual features of the respondent, we find that individuals who are more informed about the costs and functioning of the Italian pension system are more willing to accept reforms. This result holds also using non-parametric methods, such as propensity-score matching. However, the data also suggest that information is endogenous, and jointly determined with policy opinions. We therefore estimate a causal effect of information, with joint maximum likelihood and instrumental variables. These different methods all confirm a positive and significant causal effect of better information on the willingness to accept reforms that reduce the generosity of the pension system. Finally we do not find that exposure to media coverage of pension issues significantly improves information, possibly because individuals read newspaper articles or watch TV programs on these issues just to confirm their priors.
The Oxford Handbook of Political Behaviour examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on articles from leading scholars of political behaviour research. What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new responsibilities for the citizenry. These political changes are paralleled by tremendous advances in our empirical knowledge of citizens and their behaviours through the institutionalization of systematic, comparative study of contemporary publics ranging from the advanced industrial democracies to the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to new survey research on the developing world. These articles describe how citizens think about politics, how their values shape their behaviour, the patterns of participation, the sources of vote choice, and how public opinion impacts on governing and public policy. This is a comprehensive review of the cross-national literature of citizen behaviour and the relationship between citizens and their governments. The Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.
The Risk of Social Policy? uses a comparative perspective to systematically analyse the effects of social policy reforms and welfare state retrenchment on voting choice for the government. It re-examines twenty elections in OECD countries to show if and how social policy issues drive elections.
Population-based survey experiments have become an invaluable tool for social scientists struggling to generalize laboratory-based results, and for survey researchers besieged by uncertainties about causality. Thanks to technological advances in recent years, experiments can now be administered to random samples of the population to which a theory applies. Yet until now, there was no self-contained resource for social scientists seeking a concise and accessible overview of this methodology, its strengths and weaknesses, and the unique challenges it poses for implementation and analysis. Drawing on examples from across the social sciences, this book covers everything you need to know to plan, implement, and analyze the results of population-based survey experiments. But it is more than just a "how to" manual. This lively book challenges conventional wisdom about internal and external validity, showing why strong causal claims need not come at the expense of external validity, and how it is now possible to execute experiments remotely using large-scale population samples. Designed for social scientists across the disciplines,Population-Based Survey Experimentsprovides the first complete introduction to this methodology. Offers the most comprehensive treatment of the subject Features a wealth of examples and practical advice Reexamines issues of internal and external validity Can be used in conjunction with downloadable data from ExperimentCentral.org for design and analysis exercises in the classroom.
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approaches to political parties and public opinion can be best reconciled and examined through a richer theoretical perspective grounded in motivated reasoning theory. Clearly, parties shape citizens' opinions by mobilizing, influencing, and structuring choices among political alternatives. But the answer to when and how parties influence citizens' reasoning and political opinions depends on an interaction between citizens' motivations, effort, and information generated from the political environment (particularly through competition between parties). The contribution of motivated reasoning, as we describe it, is to provide a coherent theoretical framework for understanding partisan influence on citizens' political opinions. We review recent empirical work consistent with this framework. We also point out puzzles ripe for future research and discuss how partisan‐motivated reasoning provides a useful point of departure for such work.
This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a postindustrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.
The demographic changes that have occurred in European countries in recent decades have made the policies of the public pension system one of the most debated issues of the welfare state. In this paper, I focus on preferences for three pension policy reforms with different distributive consequences: raising contributions, raising the age of retirement, and allowing free choice between public and private pension plans. I use multilevel models to analyse how individual attachment to different solidarity principles (universalistic, conservative, liberal and familistic) affects attitudes toward pension system reforms while controlling for institutional factors. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that solidarity principles have a significant influence on individual preferences. I find that individuals who adhere to universalistic or conservative principles are more in favour of increasing contributions in order to maintain the level of pensions, whereas they oppose a postponement of retirement age. In contrast, those who adhere to liberal or familistic principles are against increasing contributions and prefer extending retirement age. The findings at least partially support the 'regime hypothesis', as a more generous pension system appears to increase support for raising contributions while decreasing support for a raise in the age of retirement.
Recent decades have seen increased interest in public attitudes towards public pension policies. Most previous research, however, relies heavily on dependent variables that fail to reflect the effective alternatives being discussed in most affluent democracies. This article seeks to improve our understanding of public attitudes towards pragmatic welfare policy options by examining cross-national differences in attitudes towards (i) cuts in old-age pension benefits, (ii) increases in social security contributions, and (iii) increases in the statutory retirement age. We test predictions of the dominant positive policy feedback theory and the alternative negative policy feedback theory. These approaches argue that policies induce consequences and attitudes that reinforce (positive feedback) or undermine (negative feedback) past policymaking trajectories. Empirical results obtained by multilevel analyses from a sample of 27 European countries are consistent mainly with the negative feedback approach. In countries with higher statutory retirement ages, citizens are more likely to support a postponement of retirement. However, in countries with higher elderly poverty, citizens are less likely to support cuts in pension benefits. In countries with higher social security contributions, citizens are less likely to support further increases in these contributions.
Faced with demographic ageing, European policy makers since the mid-1990s have taken a turn from fostering early retirement to promoting longer working life by reducing early exit incentives and facilitating work continuation. However, it remains open whether these reforms are yet reflected in the retirement plans and preferences of future pensioners’ cohorts. Using most recent data on desired retirement ages from the fifth wave of the European Social Survey (2010/11 wave), this paper empirically investigates how far current policy reforms are in line with the retirement age preferences of older workers aged 45 and over. Results show that older workers approaching retirement ages still intend to retire before the politically envisioned age of 65, and in many cases also before nationally defined standard retirement ages. Despite visible progress in implementing active ageing measures, the challenge of motivating older workers to continue working until or even beyond retirement ages thus remains. At the same time, there are regime-specific problem groups that face difficulties in adjusting to the active ageing paradigm of longer working life. Especially in countries with little employment support, those with unstable work careers, employment interruptions and few financial resources are at a high risk of being crowded out from late career employment and thus from the possibility of ensuring a decent standard of living in old age.
The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that public opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American Politics.
Political awareness affects virtually every aspect of citizens' political attitudes and voting behavior. Among its effects are greater attitude stability, greater ideological consistency, and greater support for a nation's “mainstream” values. Yet there exists no comprehensive explanation of why political awareness has the pervasive effects that it has. Nor is there agreement on how the concept of political awareness should be conceptualized and measured. This article addresses both concerns. First, it draws on ideas from voting, belief-system, and other studies to develop a general theory of the effects of awareness. This account centers on how citizens use cues and other information from political elites to translate their general value orientations into support for particular polices. Second, the article argues that, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, political awareness is best measured by simple tests of factual information about politics.
Long-term trends in deservingness opinions and how these fluctuate in relation to changes in the economic, institutional and political contexts have not often been examined. In this paper, we address these trend questions by analyzing 22 waves of the repeated cross-sectional Cultural Change in The Netherlands (CCN, 1975–2006) survey. Our analyses show fairly stable public deservingness opinions regarding five different needy groups over the long term. Over the short term, opinions fluctuate more. Explanatory analyses show that economic and political factors, but not institutional factors, are especially influential over fluctuations in opinions. When real GDP grows, the Dutch public is more likely to consider the disabled, the elderly and social assistance beneficiaries deserving of more welfare support. In addition, when unemployment rises, the unemployed and social assistance beneficiaries are more likely to be seen as deserving of more support. Finally, when the national political climate is more leftist, most needy groups are considered to be deserving of more welfare support.
Do mass policy preferences influence the policy output of welfare states in developed democracies? This is an important issue for welfare state theory and research, and this article presents an analysis that builds from analytical innovations developed in the emerging literature on linkages between mass opinion and public policy. The authors analyze a new dataset combining a measure of social policy preferences with data on welfare state spending, alongside controls for established causal factors behind social policy-making. The analysis provides evidence that policy preferences exert a significant influence over welfare state output. Guided also by statistical tests for endogeneity, the authors find that cross-national differences in the level of policy preferences help to account for a portion of the differences among social, Christian, and liberal welfare state regimes. The results have implications for developing fruitful connections between welfare state scholarship, comparative opinion research, and recent opinion/policy studies.
In this article the relationship between the economic situation and public support for the welfare state is investigated. Two hypotheses are presented: (1) serious economic crises reduce the support for welfare, and (2) once the crisis is over, support will gradually return to its pre-crisis level. These hypotheses are studied using Finnish public opinion data from 1975 to 1993, and considerable support for them is found. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that, even during a deep recession, public opinion gives higher priority to the welfare functions of the state over other functions.
Contrary to much of the literature on collective opinion, I find that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge in the mass public often cause opinion surveys to misrepresent the mix of voices in a society. To assess the bias introduced by information effects, I compare "fully informed" collective preferences simulated from actual survey data to collective preferences revealed in the original data. Analysis of policy questions from the 1988 and 1992 American National Election Studies shows that group differences in knowledge, along with the public's modest average level of political knowledge, cart cause significant distortions in measures of collective opinion. The mass public may appear more progressive on some issues and more conservative on others than would be the case if all citizens were equally well informed. To the extent that opinion polls influence democratic politics, this suggests that information effects can impair the responsiveness of governments to their citizens.
This article challenges the often untested assumption that cognitive "heuristics" improve the decisionmaking abilities of everyday voters. The potential benefits and costs of five common political heuristics are discussed. A new dynamic process-tracing methodology is employed to directly observe the use of these five heuristics by voters in a mock presidential election campaign. We find that cognitive heuristics are at times employed by almost all voters and that they are particularly likely to be used when the choice situation facing voters is complex. A hypothesized interaction between political sophistication and heuristic use on the quality of decision making is obtained across several different experiments, however. As predicted, heuristic use generally increases the probability of a correct vote by political experts but decreases the probability of a correct vote by novices. A situation in which experts can be led astray by heuristic use is also illustrated. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for strategies to increase input from under-represented groups into the political process.
This book develops and tests a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy, in which preferences for policy both drive and adjust to changes in policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both “public responsiveness” and “policy representation” is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the “salience” of the different domains and governing institutions – specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).
This article considers the impact of public opinion on public policy, asking: (1) how much impact it has; (2) how much the impact increases as the salience of issues increases; (3) to what extent the impact of public opinion may be negated by interest groups, social movement organizations, political parties, and elites; (4) whether responsiveness of governments to public opinion has changed over time; and (5) the extent to which our conclusions can be generalized. The source of data is publications published in major journals and included in major literature reviews, systematically coded to record the impact of public opinion on policy. The major findings include: the impact of public opinion is substantial; salience enhances the impact of public opinion; the impact of opinion remains strong even when the activities of political organizations and elites are taken into account; responsiveness appears not to have changed significantly over time; and the extent to which the conclusions can be generalized is limited. Gaps in our knowledge made apparent by the review are addressed in proposals for an agenda for future research.
This essay seeks to lay the foundation for an understanding of
welfare state retrenchment. Previous discussions have generally
relied, at least implicitly, on a reflexive application of theories
designed to explain welfare state expansion. Such an approach is
seriously flawed. Not only is the goal of retrenchment (avoiding
blame for cutting existing programs) far different from the goal of
expansion (claiming credit for new social benefits), but the welfare
state itself vastly alters the terrain on which the politics of social
policy is fought out. Only an appreciation of how mature social
programs create a new politics can allow us to make sense of the
welfare state's remarkable resilience over the past two decades of
austerity. Theoretical argument is combined with quantitative and
qualitative data from four cases (Britain, the United States,
Germany, and Sweden) to demonstrate the shortcomings of
conventional wisdom and to highlight the factors that limit or
facilitate retrenchment success.
What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues—the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.
This article presents the results of the first Deliberative Poll, in which a national British sample discussed the issue of rising crime and what to do about it. We describe Deliberative Polling and its rationale, the representativeness of the deliberative sample, the extent to which the participants acquired factual information about the issue and about politics generally, and how much and how they changed their views. We also weigh the extent to which such changes of view hinge on small group influences versus information gains.
American elections depends substantially on the vitality of the national economy. Prosperity benefits candidates for the House of Representatives from the incumbent party (defined as the party that controls the presidency at the time of the election), whereas economic downturns enhance the electoral fortunes of opposition candidates. Short-term fluctuations in economic conditions also to appear to affect the electorates's presidential choice, as well as the level of public approval conferred upon the president during his term. By this evidence, the political consequences of macroeconomic conditions are both pervasive an powerful. But just how do citizens know whether the incumbant party has succeeded or failed? What kinds of economic evidence do people weigh in their political appraisals? The purpose of our paper is to examine two contrasting depictions of individual citizens - emphasizing the political signifigance of citizens' own economic predicaments, the other stressing the political importance.
Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects—called “need to evaluate”—and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process.
This article explores individual differences in citizens’ reliance on cues and values in political thinking. It uses experimental
evidence to identify which citizens are likely to engage in heuristic processing and which citizens are likely to engage in
systematic processing in developing opinions about a novel issue. The evidence suggests that political awareness crisply distinguishes
between heuristic and systematic processors. The less politically aware rely on party cues and not on an issue-relevant value.
As political awareness increases, reliance on party cues drops and reliance on an issue-relevant value rises. Need for cognition
fails to yield clear results. The results suggest two routes to opinion formation: heuristic processing and systematic processing.
Political awareness, not need for cognition, predicts which route citizens will take.
Research in political behavior has increasingly turned to the cognitions underlying attitudes. The simplest of these cognitions are political facts - the bits of information about politics that citizens hold. While other key concepts in political science - partisanship, trust, tolerance - have widely used (if still controversial) measures that facilitate comparisons across time and among studies, the discipline has no generally accepted measure of the public's level of political information. This paper describes the development and testing of survey-based measures of political knowledge, with special attention to the existing items on the National Election Study surveys. In so doing, it illustrates the use of a variety of techniques for item analysis and scale construction. We also present a recommended five-item knowledge index.
Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This article makes use of a unique data set collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important effects of motivated reasoning. In particular, affective biases should cause citizens to take longer processing information incongruent with their existing affect and such biases should also direct search for new information about candidates. Somewhat perversely, motivated reasoners may actually increase their support of a positively evaluated candidate upon learning new negatively evaluated information. Findings are reported that support all of these expectations. Additional analysis shows that these affective biases may easily lead to lower quality decision making, leading to a direct challenge to the notion of voters as rational Bayesian updaters.
Analysis of decision making under risk has been dominated by expected utility theory, which generally accounts for people's actions. Presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and argues that common forms of utility theory are not adequate, and proposes an alternative theory of choice under risk called prospect theory. In expected utility theory, utilities of outcomes are weighted by their probabilities. Considers results of responses to various hypothetical decision situations under risk and shows results that violate the tenets of expected utility theory. People overweight outcomes considered certain, relative to outcomes that are merely probable, a situation called the "certainty effect." This effect contributes to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains, and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. In choices where gains are replaced by losses, the pattern is called the "reflection effect." People discard components shared by all prospects under consideration, a tendency called the "isolation effect." Also shows that in choice situations, preferences may be altered by different representations of probabilities. Develops an alternative theory of individual decision making under risk, called prospect theory, developed for simple prospects with monetary outcomes and stated probabilities, in which value is given to gains and losses (i.e., changes in wealth or welfare) rather than to final assets, and probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The theory has two phases. The editing phase organizes and reformulates the options to simplify later evaluation and choice. The edited prospects are evaluated and the highest value prospect chosen. Discusses and models this theory, and offers directions for extending prospect theory are offered. (TNM)