Quality of Government Perceptions and Preferences for Economic Redistribution and Government Intervention in Economic Life

This project examines the impact of perceptions about the quality of government on support for state-sponsored redistribution. While existing scholarship has identified a number of factors that shape welfare state attitudes, individual evaluations of institutional quality have received relatively little attention. This omission is problematic because many countries around the world suffer from severe governance problems. I seek to address this gap by studying the way in which exposure to information about corruption and institutional inefficiency affects views on the role of the state in alleviating socio-economic inequality. To do this, I rely on three empirical strategies. I begin by running a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis drawing on observational data from 25 European countries over 20 years. I link perceptions of corruption and government inefficiency to views about the role of the state in socio-economic life. I proceed to leverage a natural experiment in Denmark where a public servant was arrested for corruption and embezzlement of especially large proportions. Lastly, I run an original priming experiment in the United Kingdom. Drawing on an audit report by the Department of Work and Pensions, I inform participants of the amount of fund misallocation within the Universal Credit system and ask them about their support for different welfare, social investment, and market intervention policies. This multi-stage empirical approach allows me to explore whether perceptions about corruption and institutional quality are correlated with welfare state attitudes and how respondents’ support for state-sponsored redistribution changes in response to their being primed to think about the quality of the institutional apparatus and the cleanliness of the bureaucratic service in their country.