What Makes People Support Public Responsibility for Welfare Provision: Self-interest or Political Ideology?

Abstract

This article investigates which socio-economic and ideological factors make individuals support the normative principles of the welfare state. Two principal theoretical perspectives, relating to self-interest and the political ideology, respectively, have been proposed in the literature as causal explanations. However, as most studies utilize solely cross-sectional data, causal interpretations of which factors make people express support for the welfare state have so far been hard to sustain. This article, using panel data from the Canadian ‘Equality, Security, and Community’ survey and an extended random-effect model, exploits the longitudinal nature of the data and econometric methods to provide a more accurate analysis of the extent to which self-interest and political ideology actually determine support for welfare state principles. The empirical analysis indicates that both self-interest and political ideology variables to some extent are significant predictors of support for welfare state principles. In addition, the article discusses several avenues for future research.