The Social Welfare Deficit: Spending Preferences and Policy Responsiveness

Citizens in affluent democracies strongly support additional government spending on big-ticket social welfare programs including health, education, old age pensions, and (to a lesser extent) unemployment. I use survey data (from four successive waves of the International Social Survey Program's Role of Government module) and data on spending (from the OECD's Social Expenditure data base) to assess the extent and basis of these apparent discrepancies between citizens' preferences and government policies across countries and policy domains and over time. Possible explanatory factors include countervailing public preferences for government budget-cutting (also measured in the ISSP surveys), disparities in political influence between high- and low-income citizens, differing perceptions of economic capacity (as measured by GDP per capita) between citizens and policy-makers, and insensitivity of citizens to actual spending levels. I also examine differences in policy congruence and responsiveness across countries with different political institutions (majoritarian versus proportional, presidential versus parliamentary, centralized versus federal). My findings suggest that conventional studies of policy responsiveness, which relate marginal shifts in opinion to marginal shifts in policy, may overlook substantial chronic mismatches between public preferences and policy. They likewise suggest that conventional studies of ideological congruence, which compare the positions of citizens and parties on broad ideological scales, may shed little light on the extent of congruence between public preferences and specific concrete policies.