Do Australians want the welfare state?

The failures of the Australian welfare state are often implicitly argued to derive in large part from the conservatism of the Australian public. This research uses public opinion poll data from 1940 to 1985 to question some of the claims made about public opinion and Australian welfare. These data indicate that post‐World War Two governments were not the captives of public opposition to expanded welfare provision. The public favoured generous, universal and contributory welfare provision in specific areas where the policies of successive Australian governments favoured selective, illiberal welfare measures funded by taxation. Moreover, public support for government health schemes suggests that welfare programmes generate public support rather than result from it.

This evidence suggests that explanations for the conservatism of the Australian welfare state lie elsewhere.     

Policy attributes shape climate policy support

Understanding how preferences for public policy instruments shape policy support helps policymakers to design policies that begin to tackle large-scale and complex problems, such as climate change. Climate change policies generate both local and global costs and benefits, which affect the public's policy preferences. In this article we investigate the role of perceived conditional cooperation and distributive concerns on climate policy attitude formation. We identify a range of climate policies and test public opinion for adoption of these policies at different scales of government. The important theoretical distinction is the scale-driven distributional nature of policy costs and benefits as well as concerns regarding the cooperation of other actors. We use data from Sweden and a conjoint experimental design where we vary level of government, type of policy, and the targeted group. We find evidence that people support policies when costs are shared broadly. We also find that support for climate policy is conditional on expected policy adoption by other units of government at various scales. This implies that unpopular climate policies might be more popular if the funding structure of the policy allows for binding policy and that the cost-sharing is taking place at higher levels of government.     

Public Opinion and Policymaking in the States: The Case of Post-Roe Abortion Policy

Whether public opinion should be expected to play a role in the shaping of abortion legislation in the states is a debatable question. Representation is a difficult task, especially if legislators receive mixed cues from the public, activists, and the political parties. In this study, we find that grass-roots activism and public opinion tend to match, and both are reflected in state abortion policy. In addition, more Pro-Life policies are found in states with a tradition of conservative policies in other areas, Republican majorities in the state legislature, more Catholic residents, and fewer women legislators. These patterns hold true for a composite index of abortion policies and for the specific policy area of government funding of abortions. Slightly different patterns occur for parental consent laws, though these statutes also tend to reflect general preferences on abortion and interest group activity in a state.     

The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty

City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the “floors” principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living‐wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policies—collective‐action theory, regime theory, and pluralism—and for advocates on behalf of the urban poor.     

Deserving to Whom? Investigating Heterogeneity in the Impact of Social Constructions of Target Populations on Support for Affirmative Action

The social construction of target populations has emerged as an influential framework for understanding the public policy process. In particular, target populations have been shown to shape the allocation of benefits and burdens by political elites. However, existing studies focus on the elite level, which overlooks whether public preferences are aligned with the allocation of policy benefits and burdens by political elites. Moreover, many studies treat social constructions as homogenous, which this paper calls into question. Using a nation‐wide survey experiment, I investigate variation in public support for affirmative action policies with randomly assigned target populations. The findings indicate that the public formulates policy preferences on the basis of perceived deservingness of target groups similar to political elites. In addition, the findings uncover heterogeneity in the effect of targeting on public opinion based on ideology and racial/ethnic group identity.     

Welfare Caseload Change: An Alternative Approach

In the last decade, caseloads in AFDC/TANF have shifted dramatically up, then down. Of existing studies based on time series or state panel data, some tend to underplay the role of welfare reform. All say little about what policies drove the decline or about the role of governmental quality. An approach using cross-sectional models explains interstate differences in caseload change rather than the national trend but allows more discussion about the role of policy and government. Results suggest that grant levels, work and child support requirements, and sanctions are important explainers of change, along with some demographic terms and unemployment. These policies in turn are tied to states' political opinion, political culture, and institutional capacity. Moralistic states seem the most capable of transforming welfare in the manner the public wants.     

Understanding Public Support for Time Limits and Other Welfare Reforms

This article presents results of a reanalysis of data from a survey of New York residents regarding that state's welfare system and proposed welfare reform. The data danger from most previous studies of public opinion about welfare because questions were asked about a range of specific welfare reform options, such as various time limits, eligibility restrictions, and work requirements, that are key features of the new federal welfare law. Specifically, the analysis explores the extent to which public support for these reforms can be explained by self interest factors, political qualification, and beliefs regarding the poor, social rights, and the welfare system. White these variables have been found to be important in prior research, they provide a somewhat less consistent explanation of support for specific features of the new welfare system in the United States.     

Perceived Risk and Citizen Preferences for Governmental Management of Routine Hazards

Risk perceptions are important to the policy process because they inform individuals’ preferences for government management of hazards that affect personal safety, public health, or ecological conditions. Studies of risk in the policy process have often focused on explicating the determinants of risk perceptions for highly salient, high consequence hazards (e.g., nuclear energy). We argue that it is useful to also study more routinely experienced hazards; doing so shows the relevance of risk perceptions in individuals’ daily lives. Our investigation focuses on the impact perceived risk has on citizens’ preferences over hazard management policies (as distinct from identifying risk perception determinants per se). We use a recursive structural equation model to analyze public opinion data measuring attitudes in three distinct issue domains: air pollution, crime, and hazardous waste storage and disposal. We find that citizens utilize perceived risk rationally: greater perceived risk generally produces support for more proactive government to manage potential hazards. This perceived risk–policy response relationship generally holds even though the policy options respondents were asked to consider entailed nontrivial costs to the public. The exception seems to be when individuals know less about the substantive issue domain.     

The good, the bad and the confusing: the political economy of social care expansion in South Korea

Recent social policy reforms in South Korea indicate a progressive shift by a conservative government to modify the familialistic male breadwinner model that informs its welfare regime. The Korean government has demonstrated support for women through an increase in the provision, regulation and coordination of childcare and workplace support programmes for working parents. At the same time, labour market reforms have also created more pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. Conflicting social and economic policy objectives have resulted in a confusing mix of policies, advancing and impeding gender equality at the same time. This contribution examines the recent family–work reconciliation policy reforms in Korea and discusses why these reforms may be good politics but a bad deal for women.     

The Odd Compartmentalization: Public Opinion,Aggregate Data,and Policy Analysis*

This article examines some of the assumptions that underlie the use of aggregate data for policy analysis, In particular, it explores the consequences of the assumption of antagonistic attitudes between “haves” and “have nots” on social welfare policies. Use of public opinion data demonstrates the low salience of regressiveness of taxation and thereby calls into question the validity of a common indice in aggregate analysis. The use of this and related examples is intended to demonstrate the value of supplementing aggregate data analysis of public policy with direct evidence about public attitudes toward those policies.     

The Role of Public Input in State Welfare Policymaking

This article reports findings from a survey of 257 state officials involved in public assistance policymaking in the American states during the early to mid-1990s. Respondents were asked to comment on the impetus for welfare reform, on methods employed to gauge public preferences, and on sources of policy ideas. These officials, including state legislators, social service agency directors, and senior advisors to governors, revealed a variety of forums for gathering public input. Although few respondents affiliated with elective office reported significant direct electoral challenges on welfare issues, they often cited constituent contacts regarding welfare reform.     

Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change

In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right‐oriented react thermostatically and the left‐oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.     

BUSINESS AND THE NORDIC WELFARE STATES, 1890-1970

Social scientists have, since the 1990s, shown an increasing interest in the role of business actors in welfare state development, and these debates provide many opportunities for historians of the Nordic countries to contribute with their insights and findings. This special issue brings together six historical studies on the role of business in the development of the welfare states in the Nordic countries, including the role of firms as providers of company welfare as well as the activities of firms and of business interest groups to influence policies and public opinion. Two observations stand out. First, the contributions draw a picture of a gradual shift in this period from that of fundamental opposition, which often dominated up to the mid-20th century, to a more pragmatic approach of cooperation. Cooperation in policy-making co-existed with confrontation in public debate, in which business interest groups promoted alternatives to ‘big government’. Second, these studies underline the value of paying attention to what Reinhart Koselleck called ‘horizons of expectations’. These historical studies show how the vocabulary of the actors changed in this period, and how business interest groups not only influenced political decisions but also adapted their expectations to changes in the political context.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

Cultural Worldview and Preference for Childhood Vaccination Policy

In the face of the reemerging threat of preventable diseases and the simultaneous vaccine risk controversy, what explains variations in Americans’ policy preferences regarding childhood vaccinations? Using original data from a recent nationwide Internet survey of 1,213 American adults, this research seeks to explain differing public opinions on childhood vaccination policies and related issues of governance. As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's grid‐group cultural theory of policy preference formation suggests, cultural biases have a significant impact on the formation of preferences toward various vaccination policies. Hierarchs are in support of mandatory vaccination, oppose religious and philosophical exemption, and believe the government should preside over vaccination‐related decisions. Fatalists strike a bold contrast in their opposition to mandatory vaccination policy and support for religious and philosophical exemptions and the role of parents in deciding on vaccinations. Falling between hierarchs and fatalists, egalitarian support for vaccinations is stronger than individualists‘.     

Public opinion and policy responsiveness: the case of same-sex marriage in Australia

This article examines congruence between public opinion and politicians’ positions on same-sex marriage in the Australian House of Representatives from 2012 to 2016. In contrast median voter theorem and other office-motivated frameworks, Australian federal politicians have largely ignored majority opinion, which has been supportive of same-sex marriage for a decade. Using a unique dataset (n?=?601,550) of voter preferences collected during the 2013 federal election, and collated Hansard and media data, we compare public opinion on same-sex marriage with politicians’ public positions. We find a status quo bias, suggesting the influence of special interest groups in this policy area. Yet, we also find parliamentarians are responsive to public opinion once it reaches a critical level, and that very low opposition to same-sex marriage in an electorate predicts policy support from its MP, which varies by party and over time.     

Public game funding in the Nordic region

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the policies related to support structures surrounding national game industries, with focus on the three Nordic countries Finland, Norway and Sweden, and investigate what kind of context the Nordic welfare state model has provided for game development. The three cases illustrate how Nordic welfare state measures have interacted with the games industry over time. While the political ideals have been fairly similar, our study demonstrates how the objectives and practical means of state engagement have differed significantly. We argue that although the three countries all have support schemes of which game companies can take advantage, there are significant differences in the degree to which each individual country has organized government interventions and support. While the Finnish state has treated game development as an endeavour in business development, the regional Nordic game program and the Norwegian state has developed a cultural policy that primarily aims to protect the cultural heritage. The Swedish state has not established a tailormade policy directed towards game development but has a broad spectrum of general policies for supporting research and business development. We suggest that future research should investigate how the public funding is structured and how discourses are formulated around appeals for more public funding for the games industry.     

No Race in Any Direction: State Welfare and Income Regimes

This paper has two objectives. First, we examine state adoption and implementation of income support policies under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. We develop a composite measure of income support that includes welfare programs that scholars traditionally investigate and adds optional policies that encourage independence through work. Second, we engage a substantive focus on the administrative ability and willingness of states to adopt and implement sophisticated income support policies. We investigate the extent to which state government professionalism, ideology, economic resources, and racially based policies have shaped state policy. We find that the percentage of the state population is liberal; state racial demographics and governmental professionalism are critical determinants of state welfare and income support regimes. Significantly, we find no evidence that states are converging toward high‐quality, effectively financed welfare policies or income regime policies to help the poor move into and economically survive in the job market.     

20世纪60年代以来美国女性单亲家庭变迁初探

20世纪60年代以来,美国女性单亲家庭数量骤增,引发大规模道德批判风潮,政治倾向日渐保守,政府福利政策随之紧缩。综观其发展历程可知,两性经济格局的变更,婚姻与性观念的嬗变,单身母亲自有的婚育价值观,政府公共政策的双重作用,合力推动了美国女性单亲家庭的群体扩张。就所占比重和贫困程度而言,黑人女性单亲家庭是尤其值得关注的群体。对以母子为基本关系单位的家庭模式的认可度,以及黑人社区中适婚男性数量上的匮乏,是美国黑人家庭中女性单亲家庭比重较大的特定因素。     

南京国民政府的华侨教育政策与措施

本文分析南京国民政府为了加强对华侨教育的全面管理和支持而采取的一系列政策与措施。作者认为,南京国民政府重视华侨教育的原因是多方面的,其华侨教育政策有着积极的作用,但也存在一些弊端和问题。