Poster #63 - Who Bears the Burden? Attitudinal Profiles of Government Responsibility and Redistributive Spending

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

As states assume greater discretion over social spending in a period of federal retrenchment, variation in public support for government responsibility may shape which redistributive policies become politically viable across states. Yet existing research often treats support for redistribution as a single ideological continuum, with less attention to whether these attitudes form distinct population profiles and how those profiles map onto groups with differing exposure to public programs and administrative burden.

Using the 2024 General Social Survey, with the 2018 wave as a robustness check, this study develops a typology of government responsibility attitudes in the United States. The analysis uses a four-stage pipeline consisting of exploratory factor analysis, index construction, k-means clustering, and survey-weighted regression. Results show that attitudes toward government responsibility for inequality and poverty form a coherent latent dimension that is stable across survey years.

K-means clustering identifies three distinct attitudinal profiles. Government Skeptics express consistently low support for government responsibility. Strong Supporters express consistently high support and are disproportionately Black, consistent with theories of administrative burden and unequal exposure to public programs. Conditional Supporters endorse broad efforts to reduce inequality but are less supportive of concrete welfare spending, a pattern that aligns with longstanding distinctions between "deserving" and "undeserving" populations in American social policy. Social trust does not meaningfully distinguish these profiles, suggesting that government responsibility attitudes operate somewhat independently from generalized interpersonal trust.

Multinomial logistic regression shows that Black respondents are significantly more likely than White respondents to belong to the Strong Supporter profile and significantly less likely to belong to the Government Skeptic profile. Survey-weighted regression further indicates that stronger government responsibility attitudes are associated with greater support for spending to improve conditions for Black Americans, even after controlling for demographics. This relationship also appears for health and environmental spending but is weaker for roads and other generalized domains, suggesting that support for redistribution is domain-specific and racially structured.

This study makes two contributions. First, a typological approach provides a richer account of public opinion than treating redistribution attitudes as a single continuum. Second, support for redistributive policy is unevenly distributed across the population in ways shaped by race, institutional exposure, and beliefs about deservingness. In a fifty-state policy environment where federal retrenchment transfers both authority and political risk to states, identifying where Strong Supporters and Conditional Supporters are concentrated may help policymakers anticipate coalitional support for redistributive programs, tailor messaging, and assess where equity-oriented spending is politically viable.

Author

• Yeon-Joo Kang, The New School
  Presenting Author