Saturday, March 15, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
This paper explores the way in which citizens' experiences with local-level institutions and national market institutions and practices shape mass political behavior. The central claim of a growing literature on policy feedbacks is that public policies differ significantly in their design, and that by altering the material stakes that different groups have in government and by sending different messages to welfare beneficiaries, they strongly shape the likelihood of political mobilization by different groups. Despite scholarly interest in policy feedbacks, we know relatively little about how local contexts interact with program characteristics to influence shape individuals' perceptions of government and patterns of collective action.
This paper exploits a 'natural experiement' in marketization, the introduction private providers in the provision of incapacity benefits in the UK. In parts of the UK, contracts were alloted to private providers, whereas in other places they were not. In linking citizens on and off benefits to different regional provision structures, both before and after changes, this paper tests in the impact of marketization on the public attitudes and participatory behavior.
