Knowledge of Social Rights and Access to Social Programs: Two Survey Experiments

• In Event: Voter Expectations, Corruption, and Social Welfare

Abstract

Across the globe today, lower and middle-income democracies promise more social rights and social program benefits to more citizens than they have at any time in the past. At the same time, however, a vast literature demonstrates that access to social welfare programs and benefits remains highly uneven. What explains why some citizens actually receive the social benefits and programs for which they are eligible while others do not? In this paper, we develop and test theory in which we argue that knowledge of social rights can help explain individual variation in access to social program benefits. In middle and lower-income democracies, the actual achievement of social rights often requires persistence and stamina in dealing with the state. We argue that greater knowledge of social rights has two effects. First, it increases feelings of deservingness and entitlement to social benefits. Second, it increases expectations that the state will actually provide promised benefits. Together, we contend that these two effects increase feelings of self-efficacy and lessen the perceived costs of pursuing social rights. We test this theory using two related survey experiments in Brazil. We develop a novel battery of beliefs about social program access. Both experiments use a sample of lower-middle-class and lower-class respondents. For both experiments, we randomly assign some respondents to receive information about social rights and others to a control condition, and then compare their beliefs and reported behaviors to individuals who did not receive this information. We use information from focus groups in Brazil to help interpret our results.

Authors

• Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Brown University

• Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign