Moral Foundations of Welfare Attitudes: How Bad is Free Riding?

• In Event: Moral Concerns and Political Behavior: New Approaches

Abstract

Support for welfare is tied to beliefs about the prevalence of free riding among recipients (e.g. the belief that the modal recipient is not trying hard enough to find a job). Beliefs about the prevalence of free riding are unrelated to the likelihood of being a recipient: large portions of the poor (rich) believe free riding to be ubiquitous (rare). Among the best predictors of perceptions of free riding are answers to questions about the death penalty, sentencing and authority more generally. This paper seeks to unpack this relationship. Free riders are a form of type I error (false positive): despite being underserving they are granted access to the benefits of social solidarity. I test the hypothesis that perceptions that free riding is ubiquitous among social policy recipients are one manifestation of a latent propensity to over-estimate the number of “false positive” in any given social situation. This propensity, in turn, is higher among individuals classified as “authoritarian.” If this is indeed the case, then a higher likelihood of seeing many “false positive” in one institutional realm (e.g. welfare) should result in a higher likelihood of also seeing a large number of false positive in other, unrelated, institutional realms (banking, immigration policy, criminal justice system). I test this hypothesis in Great Britain, using a new battery of survey items designed for this purpose.

Author

• Charlotte Cavaille, University of Michigan, Ford School of Public Policy