Abstract
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.
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Notes
Political orientation could be seen as having an endogenous character, because it is partly based on redistribution issues. However, there are also other issues that make up ones political orientation (e.g. ethnic tolerance). In addition, political orientations are formed during family socialization in early childhood long before any attitudes on welfare redistribution are formed (Kumlin 2004). This makes that one usually tends to find a negative association between left–right placement and welfare support. Empirical evidence from explicit studies on this particular issue supports our use of the left–right orientation as an exogenous variable (Jæger 2006, 2008).
The causal direction of the relationship between policy and public opinion is the subject of ongoing debate in the literature. There are examples of policies influencing opinions and examples of the reverse. The conditions that affect the direction of the relationship are still not known in detail (see e.g., Brooks and Manza 2006; Burstein 1998; Mettler and Soss 2004; Pierson 1993; Raven et al. 2011).
The feeling that a certain needy group is deserving of more support could partly be a reflection of the actual level of benefits. However, for the short-term opinion fluctuations that we analyze this is not the case because benefit levels are related to worker’s previous wages or to the minimum wage level, both of which do not show drastic fluctuations in time that we do see in these opinions.
Some of the respondents had missing values on these items, indicating ‘don’t know’ as a response. Adding these responses to the ‘sufficient’ category does not change results (results available upon request).
Previous literature examined the effect of politics using the strength of right wing parties. This is difficult to do with Dutch data, due to the multi-party system present in The Netherlands (Pettersen 1995). We did attempt to measure the effects of politics using political party strength but this proved to be unpractical.
Considering our binary dependent variable, the intraclass correlation (ICC) is calculated using the following formula:
\( \rho = \frac{{\tau_{0}^{2} }}{{\tau_{0}^{2} + \pi^{2} /3}} \)where \( \tau_{0}^{2} \) measures the group level variance (survey year) and \( \pi^{2} /3 \) the individual level variance. The individual level variance is set because it cannot be estimated for a binary dependent variable (Snijders and Bosker 1999).
We chose not to include the survey year variable in the analyses of Table 2 because we found a very strong correlation between political climate and the survey year variable (r = −.728). This means that we are not able to test both their effects properly when including them in one model. We therefore chose to include only the political climate variable because it is more substantive and theoretically interpretable.
The odds of finding higher deservingness levels are higher for women, those with less education, and those with a lower income. Additionally, the unemployed and those disabled for work, that is, actual consumers of benefits, have higher odds of finding groups deserving.
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This research was supported by a grant from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant number 400-06-138.
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Jeene, M., van Oorschot, W. & Uunk, W. The Dynamics of Welfare Opinions in Changing Economic, Institutional and Political Contexts: An Empirical Analysis of Dutch Deservingness Opinions, 1975–2006. Soc Indic Res 115, 731–749 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0230-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0230-6