The Albatross of Education: Personal Student Debt & Preferences for Redistribution

• In Event: Voting for Welfare: New Economic Risks and Voters’ Demands for Social Policies

Abstract

Student debt has skyrocketed over the past twenty years. Repayment of such debt is regularly identified as a significant source of stress in the popular press, suggesting that it is an issue directly affecting material well-being in a straightforward and apparent manner. Such topics should be central to the political economy of redistributive preferences, yet no work currently exists that investigates the political ramifications of student debt burdens. This paper presents a new theory highlighting two critical theoretical differences between student loans and other forms of personal debt: specifically, the non-tangibility of student loans, combined with the difficulty of expunging education debt in default, means that individuals are much more likely to view such loans as a burden during periods of unemployment or low earnings, thereby increasing demands for government labor market protection programs. This paper then demonstrates empirical support for my core hypotheses from the first national survey including measures of both individual student loans as well as a number of redistributive policy areas. Importantly, the paper demonstrates that --- consistent with my theoretical account ---student loans do not lead to a monotonic increase in all progressive views, but are instead associated with government programs meant to more narrowly help individuals facing labor market trouble.

Author

• Cameron Ballard-Rosa, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill