Abstract
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.
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Notes
Exclusion error indicates that there are households qualified for the financial aid but don’t get it. Inclusion error indicates that there are households disqualified for the financial aid but gets it. Both target errors indicate that respondents believed resource misuse existed in the outcomes of the anti-poverty policy.
It is a multiple response, respondents could fill them all.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the reviewers’ valuable comments that improved the manuscript. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to Dr. Wenjia Zhuang and Dr. Ijin Hong at Sun Yat-sen University for helping conversations and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. This research is supported by the Grand Project of National Social Sciences Foundation of China (No. 15ZDA050).
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Cheng, Q., Ngok, K. Welfare Attitudes Towards Anti-poverty Policies in China: Economical Individualism, Social Collectivism and Institutional Differences. Soc Indic Res 150, 679–694 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02313-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02313-y