Class matters: Public opinion and social policy among advanced capitalist democracies.
详细信息
文摘
This project offers an analysis of the relationship between public opinion and social policy among advanced capitalist democracies. Rooted in Esping-Andersen's "Three Worlds" typology, Chapter One provides a country-level analysis of this relationship for eighteen countries using International Social Survey Program, World Values Survey, and Eurobarometer data. Results suggest (1) a rift between the libertarian English-speaking countries and the more socially-oriented states of Scandinavia, continental Europe, and Japan; (2) a strong fit between differences in public opinion and variation in policy orientation when ideological responses are considered separately from policy-oriented results; (3) the emergence of Sweden and Great Britain as anomalous cases which exhibit patterns of policy preferences at odds with their Social Democratic and Liberal welfare types, respectively; and (4) a relationship between public opinion and social policy which justifies further examination of mass preferences as a source of the variation in policy among sample countries. Turning to the individual level of analysis in Chapter 2, I develop a theory of preference formation based on social class. Recent high-profile studies put forth explanations based upon calculations of economic self-interest: individuals only support social polices from which they expect to financially benefit. However, this approach is limited in that it ignores sociological and historical conditions vital to the political socialization process. As an alternative, I propose a class-based understanding of preference formation, where social class is understood as a community-based phenomenon with ties to one's familial, social, and occupational networks, and therefore influences political socialization both within these networks and intergenerationally. Results indicate that class is an important predictor of individuals' political preferences, and relatively speaking, my class-based perspective trumps the economic self-interest approach. In Chapter 3, I test my model of individual preference formation on the more relevant survey items originally discussed in Chapter 1 and extend this approach by incorporating a theory of the way class impacts socialization in some countries more than in others due to a number of country-level historical contingencies. Results indicate that historical context plays a significant part in shaping survey responses and social class varies among countries in its effect on preference formation.