2 A Quantitative Analysis of Public Opinion on the AFDC/TANF Reform : Self-Interest or Ideology?

Abstract

This paper analyzes public attitudes toward welfare reform enacted under the Clinton administration using survey data and, through this analysis, re-examines the validity of the 'self-interest' hypothesis, which is an accepted theory among welfare state scholars. Clinton's welfare reform, known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), abolished the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and transformed it into the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is a block grant to state governments. PRWORA obligated the recipients of AFDC or TANF to engage in work or job training that a state government stipulates and restricted the qualification period for benefits to a total of five years over a person's lifetime. Previous studies do not sufficiently explain the public attitudes toward this welfare reform. Welfare state theories account for welfare backlashes in liberal welfare regimes based on the 'self-interest' of constituents: while universal or social insurance programs can effectively resist welfare retrenchment because these programs benefit middle-class citizens, residual welfare programs are more easily cut because they are not beneficial to median voters. This theory is rarely supported, however, with empirical micro level evidence. On the other hand, while public opinion studies have accumulated analyses of public attitudes toward welfare, they have not yet tackled the issue of public opinion on welfare reform at the individual level. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring the factors that drove citizens to choose whether to support the welfare reform, using the American National Election Studies 1994 Data Set. The result of multivariate regression analysis endorses the self-interest hypothesis to some extent. It reveals that the income level of respondents is highly correlated with the degree of support for the welfare reform: in other words, the higher a respondent's income, the more strongly s/he supports it. This suggests that the self-interest of respondents explains public attitudes towards welfare. However, the result also indicates that the ideological variables of economic conservatism, social conservatism, distrust in government, and symbolic racism explain a large part of the variance of the dependent variable even when the socioeconomic variables are controlled. This suggests that idiosyncratic factors in the U.S. such as Puritanism and racism strongly have affected public attitudes toward welfare reform. We should therefore be cautious about generalizing the self-interest hypothesis over other countries with the case of welfare reform in the U.S.