Conflicts over policies of solidarity: the effects of group appeals and value claims on public opinion

We investigate the effects of group appeals and value claims on the extent to which people support universal social policies. We ask whether politicians can leverage people’s group belonging and their values to generate support for policies. ​Is it better to try to convince people that they belong to a group which will benefit from a policy or is it better to appeal to their values?​ What are the political and electoral implications of group and value appeals? How do different types of appeals affect the reputation of the politician who is proposing them?​ Political-sociological research finds a long-term decline in group-based preference formation. We test whether this diminishes the extent to which politicians can use groups to shape citizens' views, and whether group-based preferences are replaced by value-based preferences.​ We test our theoretical expectations about the effects of group appeals and value claims on public opinion using an experimental design. We implement the experiment in a convenience sample of students as well as representative samples of the British and German voting-age populations. Prior experimental research investigates either group appeals or value-based claims. We compare the relative effects of group and value appeals, and we also compare different types of group appeals (symbolic and benefits-based) ​and value appeals (based on an empirical assessment from text analysis of the most popular value-based claims in political debates about social policies).