Support for Disability Assistance? The Role of Deservingness in Public Opinion

• In Event: Attitudes Toward Redistribution Policies

Abstract

The American federal government will spend over 40 billion dollars on programs helping people with disabilities in a given year (Braddock 2002; Braddock et al. 2015; McCann 2015). Some of this will come through programs that are designed specifically for people with disabilities (e.g., SSDI, IDEA). Other support will pass through programs that are designed for other vulnerable groups (e.g., Medicaid), but that end up helping people with disabilities who often fall under the poverty line. In spite of the long history of government policies for people with disabilities, however, there has been little systematic work in political science examining public attitudes towards and support for disability assistance policies (Kimberlin 2009).

We hope to begin to address this oversight. This paper has three main goals. The first is to unpack the broad category of disability with respect to public perceptions. How does the American public perceive different types of disabilities (e.g., people with Down syndrome, people with ADHD, disabled veterans) that fall under this large and nebulous category? What emotions do people feel when considering different disabilities?

The second goal is to understand the differences in deservingness - the idea that the extent to which different groups are perceived as more or less worthy of state assistance varies. Across several studies, Petersen and colleagues demonstrate that use of a deservingness heuristic as a cognitive shortcut partially explains the public’s welfare policy attitudes (Jensen and Petersen 2017; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2012, 2011). We ask; does deservingness vary by disability and, if so, why? Others have begun to research the contours of disability. For instance, one key finding is that deservingness rests in part on perceptions of effort (cheaters vs reciprocators) (Petersen 2012). The deservingness heuristic also seems to operate via perceptions of control (hi versus lo control) such that an event over which one has no control (i.e.., sickness even with an active lifestyle) is seen as more deserving of support than an event over which one does have control (i.e., sickness with an inactive lifestyle or unemployment with an inactive lifestyle) (Jensen and Petersen 2017; Petersen et al. 2011). Deservingness also has a basis in emotion – cues about effort trigger emotional responses, with low effort causing anger and high effort causing compassion (Petersen et al. 2012). Using an open-ended methodology, we provide an in-depth examination of the contours of the deservingness construct.

The third goal of this paper is to connect ideas about deservingness with support for federal financial assistance. In such predictive models, we anticipate that the dimensions of deservingness might predict federal funding differently depending on the disability. For instance, preliminary research showed that we saw that pity was a primary factor predicting support for assistance across all disability types, but control and similarity – two other aspects of deservingness - predicted only certain types of support for certain groups.

We believe that this exploratory analysis can help set the stage for future projects. In particular, we hope to experimentally manipulate how disability policies are framed and explore the resultant effect on support for such policies. Moreover, we intend to explore the intersection of disability with other important marginalized identities and statuses, such as race and gender. Since disability cuts across American society, we expect that it does not act in isolation to affect perceptions of individuals, groups, and policies. Through a meaningful understanding of the factors that enable support for people with disabilities, we can begin to rectify the inequities in attention that this group has received in political science.

Authors

• Rachel Blum, Miami University

• Justin W. Holmes, University of Northern Iowa

• Monica C. Schneider, Miami University

• Dara Z. Strolovitch, Princeton University