Welfare Policies: Who Matters?

The results: That's what most people care about. What does a given study conclude? But results are no good if the scholar's data and methods are no good.

The authors of a paper that appears in the March 2020 issue of Politics & Society make that clear. Like other researchers before them, they wanted to know if the government listens to voters when it comes to welfare programs. In addition, they wanted to know if some voters—namely, the rich—count more than other voters, namely, the poor.

There is a big problem, though, in trying to answer such questions: There are two kinds of data at issue, and the two need to be linked. One are data on attitudes toward particular policies; the other are  data on changes in the generosity of the policies.

The authors manage to link the two kinds of data. The first set of data consists of survey data from many countries in different periods on attitudes toward three kinds of welfare programs: health programs, pension programs, and unemployment programs. The second set consists of data on the generosity of the programs.

What they find is what they expected: The government listens to voters, but they listen to rich voters more than poor voters. In other words, when governments adjust their welfare policies, they respond more to the wants of the rich than to the wants of the poor.

The true scholarly contribution of the paper, though, is not the findings but the data and method. The same can be said of many other academic studies.

The paper is titled "Real but Unequal Representation in Welfare State Reform" and is by Wouter Schakel of Leiden University, Brian Burgoon of the University of Amsterdam, and Armen Hakhverdian, also of the University of Amsterdam.