Economic insecurity and welfare preferences: A micro-level analysis

Comparative Politics

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 293-310

  Mughan, Anthony ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248631961     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. Ethan B. Kapstein, "Workers and the World Economy: Breaking the Postwar Bargain," Foreign Affairs, 75 (May-June 1996), 16-37.
2. Some authors do not agree that globalization is economic insecurity's source, attributing it instead to deindustrialization, See Torben Iversen and Thomas R. Cusack, "The Causes of Welfare State Expansion: Deindustrialization or Globalization?," World Politics, 52 (April 2000), 313-49.
3. Still another rival explanation is technological change. See Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter, Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2001), pp, 77-86.
4. Anthony Mughan and Dean Lacy, "Economic Performance, Job Insecurity and Electoral Choice," British Journal of Political Science, 32 (July 2002), 513-33;
5. Duane Swank and Hans-Georg Betz, "Globalization, the Welfare State and Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe," Socio-Economic Review, 1 (May 2003), 215-45.
6. David Cameron, "The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis," American Political Science Review, 72 (December 1978), 1243-61;
7. Peter Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca: Cornell Universty Press, 1985).
8. Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
9. Dani Rodrik, "Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?," Journal of Political Economy, 106 (December 1998), 997-1032.
10. Iversen and Cusack, p. 346 (emphasis added).
11. See, for example, Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter, "Economic Insecurity and the Globalization of Production," American Journal of Political Science, 48 (October 2004), 662-74.
12. This assumption of unidimensionality is highly questionable, not least because the larger phenomenon of economic (as opposed to job) insecurity is already commonly taken to be multidimensional. For one study, it comprises, in addition to job insecurity, loss of health insurance and victimization by burglary. See Jeff Dominitz and Charles F. Manski, "Perceptions of Economic Insecurity: Evidence from the Survey of Economic Expectations," Public Opinion Quarterly, 61 (Spring 1997), 261-87.
13. For another, its constituent dimensions are illness, unemployment, widowhood, and old age. See Lars Osberg, "Economic Insecurity," Discussion Paper No. 88, Social Policy Research Center (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1998).
14. A similar argument for diversity is made in a sophisticated aggregate-level analysis of the relationship between globalization and welfare compensation. See Brian Burgoon, "Globalization and Welfare Compensation: Disentangling the Ties That Bind," International Organization, 55 (Summer 2001), 509-52.
15. The United States analysis is based on a survey of 1,265 adults conducted between December 3 and 6, 1996, using random digit dialing. The data are weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence and to adjust for variations in the sample relating to geographic region, race, gender, age, and education. The survey is available from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut, archive number USNYT95-012. The Australian data are taken from the 1998 Australian Election Study, which is available from the Social Science Data Archive at the Australian National University. Its study number is 1001.
16. George E. Reida, Social Insurance and Economic Insecurity, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1994), p. 5.
17. Osberg, p. 15.
18. The full text of presidential state of the union addresses can be found at www.cspan.org/executive/stateoftheunion.asp.
19. These percentage figures are calculated over the 1970-2003 period and can be found on the website of the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, at http://data.bls.gov/PDQ//servlet/SurveyOutputServlet.
20. Fear of job loss is measured in both the U.S. and Australia by the question: "How worried are you that in the next twelve months you or someone else in your household might be out of work and looking for a job for any reason - very worried, somewhat worried, or not worried at all?"
21. The question used to tap this form of job insecurity in Australia and the U.S. is: "In your community these days, how easy is it for someone who is trying to find a job to get a good job at good wages - very easy, somewhat easy, somewhat hard, or very hard?" A similar question that refers instead to the ease of finding "an acceptable job" is used in Torben Iversen and David Soskice, "An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences," American Political Science Review, 95 (December 2001), 882.
22. USA Today, Nov. 4, 1996, p. 23A.
23. Difference-of-means tests show the insecurity measures to be different from each other at very high levels of statistical significance (.001 or better). This conclusion also holds when their medians are compared to allow for the possibility that the assumption of normal and equal-variance population distributions inherent in the t-test is violated. Details are available from the author upon request.
24. The actual text of the question is: "My next questions are about what are often called 'job lay-offs' - by that we don't mean temporary or seasonal lay-offs. We mean people losing their jobs due to employer downsizing, reductions-in-force, corporate re-structuring, permanent plant closings, jobs moving overseas, or jobs just permanently disappearing. In the past 15 years - since 1980-was there any time YOU experienced THAT type of job lay-off?" (Emphasis in the original.) Respondents who answered yes were than asked: "How many different jobs have you been laid off from?" A separate question asked respondents: "In the past 15 years-since 1980-was there anyone else in your household who has ever experienced that type of job lay-off?" The household layoffs measure combines the responses to these two questions.
25. Scheve and Slaughter, pp. 77-86.
26. Dana Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997), p. 11.
27. Specifically, those respondents falling into the two lowest educational achievement levels and the two lowest income levels ore scored 1 and everybody else is scored 0.
28. Five levels of income are specified in the survey: "Less than $15,000," "$15,000-$30,000," "$30,000-$50,000," "$50,000-$75,000, " and "Over $75,000." Respondents are placed in one of four age groups: 18 to 29 years, 30 to 44 years, 45 to 64 years, and 65 years and older.
29. The questions are: "It is the responsibility of governments to take care of people who can't take care of themselves" and "Do you favor or oppose NATIONAL HEALTH CARE INSURANCE financed by tax money paying for most forms of health care?" (Emphasis in the original.) In both cases, prowelfare responses are coded 1 and antiwelfare 0.
30. For example, Kay Lehmann Schlozman and Sidney Verba, Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class, and Political Response (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
31. A good recent overview is Duane Swank, "Globalisation, Domestic Politics, and Welfare State Retrenchment in Capitalist Democracies," Social Policy and Society, 2 (April 2005), 183-95.
32. Schlozman and Verba, p. 199.
33. I am grateful to the election study's principal investigators, Clive Bean, David Gow, and Ian McAllister, for agreeing to my request to include these items in the Australian questionnaire.
34. The exact wording is: "If the government had a choice between reducing taxes or spending more on social services, which do you think it should do?" The possible responses are: "strongly favour reducing taxes," "mildly favour reducing taxes," "depends," "mildly favour spending more on social services," and "strongly favour spending more on social services."
35. If the matching health care insurance model in Table 3 is reestimated without this variable, very similar results are generated, and the substantive conclusions remain unchanged.
36. The educational qualification categories in the Australian survey are: "no qualification," "non-trade qualification," "trade qualification," "associate diploma," "undergraduate diploma," Bachelor degree (including honours), and "postgraduate degree or postgraduate diploma."
37. Job insecurity in Australia is discussed thoroughly in Anthony Mughan, Clive Bean, and Ian McAllister, "Economic Globalization, Job Insecurity and the Populist Reaction," Electoral Studies, 22 (December 2003), 617-33.
38. See, for example, Scheve and Slaughter.
39. Robert J. Friedrich, "In Defense of the Use of Multiplicative Terms in Multiple Regression Equations," American Journal of Political Science, 26 (November 1982), 797-833.
40. Although matching data can not be generated for Australia, only 16.2 percent of Americans who felt secure in their jobs had themselves been laid off since 1980. Of those who were very worried about imminent job loss, 38.1 percent had been laid off in the same time period, When other layoffs in their household are included, the matching figures for these same two groups are 23.6 percent and 55.5 percent.
41. Individualism is not the only explanation of the U.S. nonfindings, of course. Competing with, or even complementing, it is a structural difference in the pension systems of the two countries. Social security payments to the aged in America are less tightly linked to the ups and downs in income during working lives, so that short-term interruptions in earned income may not have a strong effect on perceptions of economic insecurity. In Australia, by contrast, most people rely on an employment-based, defined contribution pension whose value is more directly tied to fluctuations in earned income. The greater risk and unpredictability associated with the Australian system may help to explain the stronger demand for institutionalized welfare provision there. I am indebted to my colleague, Sarah Brooks, for alerting me to this important difference between the countries.
42. Burgoon, p. 510.
43. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).