The Associations Between Neoliberal Policies and Attributions for Poverty in 13 Countries

Abstract

What do people think causes poverty and why? The existing literature has predominantly examined Westerners’ beliefs about the causes of poverty and how individual factors relate to different types of attributions. Less is known about the societal correlates of poverty attributions worldwide. Here, we investigate the association between country-level neoliberal policies and individualist (e.g., poor people are lazy), structural (e.g., the system is corrupt), and fatalist (e.g., poor people are unlucky) reasoning in 13 countries (N_percountry ∼500), including commonly studied Western societies (e.g., United States and United Kingdom) and societies that have been virtually unexplored (e.g., Egypt and Saudi Arabia). We find that reduced government spending predicts a greater endorsement of individualist and fatalist attributions, and labor deregulation predicts a higher endorsement of individualist attributions. Taken together, neoliberal policies potentially perpetuate ideologies that vindicate the system, while at the same time exacerbating poverty by removing mechanisms of social protection and redistribution.

Keywords

poverty attribution neoliberalism cross-national analysis non-Western societies

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