Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-2017
Capstone Advisor
Shana Kushner Gadarian
Honors Reader
Christopher Faricy
Capstone Major
Political Science
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
yes
Honors Categories
Social Sciences
Subject Categories
Health Psychology | Political Science
Abstract
The following paper examines how value-based considerations for social welfare policy opinion are affected by changes in the race of the program recipient. I propose a new model to understand social welfare policy opinion called the interactive model—where instrinsic considerations are tempered by extrinsic considerations. Through an original survey experiment, I find that humanitarianism and economic individualism do not have significant effects on social welfare policy opinion. However, egalitarianism is found to have a strong impact. When the race of the program recipient is changed from white to African-American, the impact of egalitarianism increases for views of Medicare. When the race of the program recipient is changed from white to African-American, the impact of egalitarianism decreases to zero for views of Medicaid. These results suggest that many Americans have flexible values that are influenced by outside factors when considering public policy.
Recommended Citation
Pulliam, Christopher, "The Influence of Values and Recipient Groups on Social Welfare Policy Opinion" (2017). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 1029.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/1029
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
