Public Opinion and Redistribution Policy: Congruence or Disparity?

In recent decades, more and more first-world democracies are facing challenges of representation as growing segments of their population express dissatisfaction with the attention and resources allocated to them by welfare policymakers. The current research attempts to shed light on the issue of representation by focusing on one of its manifestations - the relations between public preferences and policy decisions and outcomes. This comparative study examines the interaction between public preferences, measured by value surveys, and policy, measured by social expenditure indexes and GINI index, and the institutional factors that shape this interaction. Using panel data from 24 OECD countries from 1990-2016, the study measured: 1. the gap between public preferences and actual policy. 2. the factors affecting this gap. The proposed sources for the gap are social capital, ethnic heterogeneity, trust and perceived government effectiveness. Results showed that most OECD countries have a small gap between public preferences and policy. A few countries (like Greece, Israel and Portugal) had a negative gap, where social spending is lower than public preference. Other countries (like Sweden and Denmark) had a positive gap, where public spending is higher than public preference. Trust and government effectiveness were found as the main factors affecting the gap. The Negative gap countries belong to the Mediterranean welfare model, which is characterized by Clientelism – politicians’ exploitation of welfare systems for political gains. This is supported by the finding that trust and government effectiveness impacted the size of the gap. Hence, a possible explanation for the gap is that public perception of the national welfare system as corrupt or as a system that serves only certain (political) groups may cause individuals to become indifferent and consequently less inclined to show support for redistribution based on their actual preference.