Who’s In for No Strings? Public Opinion Support on Welfare State Reform

• In Event: Economic Inequality, Redistribution, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Universal basic income (UBI) is becoming a prominent alternative to reform the welfare state and provide a robust safety net that can act as a buffer in an economic system with numerous crisis. Yet, despite it’s the growing attention and prominence of this idea in public and political debates, we know little about the underpinnings of public opinion support for UBI. Existing research has begun to provide insights to the explanations of UBI support, yet this scholarship presents multiple challenges and has left open several questions. Much of existing research employs survey questions which conflate the multiple dimensions of UBI, hence, this work cannot detect which particular features generate support or opposition. While existing scholarship empirically shows that particular groups like the low-income, unemployed, and left-wing tend to support this policy more than their right-wing and secure counterparts, this work unable to decipher whether this support means a preference for UBI over other alternatives, or merely reflects a demand for more government intervention. Theoretically, this paper contributes to existing scholarship by providing a robust argument on why even those who favour more redistribution and government intervention should not prefer a UBI over other means-tested alternatives: the latter may be perceived as more redistributive than the former. Empirically, to test this claim and cover the existing knowledge gaps, this paper employs novel survey data including a conjoint experiment that enables to unpack the preferences for UBI, the impact of each policy design dimension and detect the preferred policy design by different individual groups. This paper provides robust empirical evidence of the argument provided. We show that while low-income and left-wing show higher support for a UBI, than their more secure and right-wing counterparts, these individuals still prefer means-tested alternatives. However, we find that a key predictor of support for UBI are perceptions on this policy’s efficiency: those who actually perceive a UBI to be more redistributive -and support redistribution- show an actual preference for UBI over other alternatives. In other words, favouring redistribution, being low-income or left-wing are not sufficient to explain support for UBI. What’s crucial is to actually perceive this policy as more redistributive. These findings have widespread implications to the study of public opinion on welfare reform and redistribution. First it shows that material and ideological accounts are not enough to predict policy preferences. It shows that support for outcomes -like redistribution- are not enough to explain favourability for particular policy proposals -like a UBI. Fully understanding public preferences means incorporating the perceptions that connect different outcomes and policies. The learnings from this paper speak not only to welfare reform but may be useful to the study of public opinion more broadly, highlighting the need to make the distinction between public opinion on outcomes and policy schemes, and the role of perceptions in mediating these two.

Author

• Leire Rincon