The underlying Public Attitude Toward Government Responsibility to Intervene in Socioeconomics, 30 Years of Evidence from the ISSP

Abstract

Since the first International Social Survey Program’s Role of Government module, many scholars assumed the “ideal government responsibility role” battery measured effects of a single unobserved attitude across individuals and societies. Attempts to substantiate this assumption offer sparse confirmatory evidence. Therefore, this research brings the most data and comprehensive measurement models thus far to investigate a single underlying attitude. Data from 1986 to 2017 in 43 countries suggest a latent ideal role attitude; however, measurement varies somewhat by historical institutions and levels of development across societies. At first the data seem to fail metric invariance tests as a first step in establishing the latent attitude. When applying corrections for a potential second attitude toward social insurance, and allowing for diverse effects of GDP, socialism, or Communist authoritarian institutional legacies, metric invariance comes into focus to a degree that most critics find acceptable. These results setup further scalar testing and descriptively demonstrate the neoliberalizaiton of preferences over time.

Keywords:

• social policy preferences
• social policy attitudes
• welfare state
• ISSP
• government responsibility

NOTES

Notes

1 Question 30, A-G, British Questionnaire, “ZA1490_bq.pdf,” available at www.gesis.org

2 E-mail exchange with M.D.R. Evans, September 28, 2018.

3 Unpublished results shared in an e-mail exchange with Jonathan Kelley, September 28, 2018.

4 Other research considers “intervention” as something the government does only during particular times of depression or crisis (Hasenfeld and Rafferty 1989).

5 https://www.gesis.org/issp/modules/issp-modules-by-topic/role-of-government/

6 There are many debates over this topic (Stevens 1946). Theory that each person should be somewhere on a continuum from supportive to opposing is the main driving force for my decision here.

7 https://osf.io/8j3va/.

8 With Germany split into two “countries” to adjudicate between former socialist and nonformer socialist historical and economic features.

9 Full results available online: https://osf.io/8j3va/wiki/Supplemental%20Results/.

10 Standardized loadings derive from potentially different sample distributions, so they are not directly comparable, but I compare them here to give a relative sense that these items are strong predictors of a latent attitude variable in each sample.

11 RMSEA = $\sqrt{{\chi }^2-{\mathit{df}}_M}$ divided by $\sqrt{N-1};$ where N = 1,195.18 (the sample average) and df = 14 (a single sample) for the population-model RMSEA, and N = 132,665 and df = 1,554 (all samples pooled) for the full-model RMSEA.

12 See Online Appendix for full results and additional analyses, https://osf.io/8j3va/.

13 https://osf.io/8j3va/.

Additional information

Funding

Funded in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 374666841 – SFB 1342.

Notes on contributors

Nate Breznau

Nate Breznau received his PhD in sociology at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences in 2013. He worked at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research and recently became part of the Comparative Research Center 1342 “The Global Dynamics of Social Policy” at the University of Bremen. He studied sociology previously at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA (MA) and Bates College, Lewiston, USA (BA). In September 2019, he starts his three-year German Science Foundation funded project “The Reciprocal Relationship of Public Opinion and Social Policy.” He is primarily an interdisciplinary opinion and policy scholar with research interests in institutions, immigration and social inequality. He is also a “Catalyst” for the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences and a vocal advocate in the Open Science Movement.