Social Democratic America (24 page)

This view has a long history. One of its best expositions is by Seymour Martin Lipset, who helped to popularize the notion of American exceptionalism. Lipset argues that Americans' belief in individualism and liberty and their hostility to government are the source of many differences between the United States and other rich countries.
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In the early 2000s, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, a British editor and writer for the
Economist
magazine, took a close look at the peculiarities of American politics and political culture. In their book
The Right Nation
, they conclude that “the United States has always been a conservative country, marinated in religion, in love with business, and hostile to the state.… Americans are exceptionally keen on limiting the size of the state and the scope of what it does.”
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A more recent statement of this view comes from Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, who argue that differences in the generosity of government social programs across the world's rich nations stem from differing popular views of the causes of poverty. Alesina and Glaeser find that in countries in which a larger share of the population believes people's effort is the key determinant of their income, government spending on social programs tends to be lower. In nations where people deem luck more important, social program expenditures tend to be higher.
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The United States is among the former. Only about 35 percent of Americans in the survey feel luck is more important than effort, compared to 60 percent of Danes.

Public opinion data support the notion that Americans don't like big government. Surveys conducted since the mid-1970s have asked representative samples of American adults, “If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services?” In only a few years did the the share choosing “bigger government providing more services” reach 50 percent; in most years, it has hovered between 30 percent and 45 percent.
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Gallup periodically asks, “In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future—big business, big labor, or big government?” Since the early 1980s, 50–70 percent of Americans have said “big government” is the largest
threat.
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For more than twenty years, the Pew Research Center has asked Americans whether they agree or disagree that “when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful.” In each year 55–75 percent have said they completely agree or mostly agree.
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The National Election Study (NES) regularly asks, “Do you think that people in government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don't waste very much of it?” In most years 60–75 percent have said “a lot.”
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Finally, since the early 1970s, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked Americans if they have “a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all” in various organizations and institutions. For Congress and the president, the share responding “a great deal of confidence” has been below 30 percent in every year.
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Public opinion data like these buttress the impression that Americans are averse to activist government. But they hide a deeper truth: although Americans are ideologically conservative when it comes to the size and scope of government, we're programmatically progressive. We're averse to big government in the abstract, but we like a lot of the things government actually does.

The GSS regularly asks a set of questions prefaced by the following statement: “We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I'm going to name some of these problems, and for each one I'd like you to tell me whether you think we're spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.” Since the late 1970s, a large majority, always over 80 percent and often more than 90 percent, has said current spending is too little or about right on “assistance to the poor,” on “improving the nation's education system,” on “improving and protecting the nation's health,” and on “Social Security.”
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An irregular series of polls between 1980 and 2007 asked, “Do you favor or oppose national health insurance, which would be financed by tax money, paying for most forms of healthcare?” In almost every instance 50–65 percent have said they are in favor, while 25–40 percent are opposed.
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In 2011,
the Pew Research Center found 61 percent of Americans saying “people on Medicare already pay enough of the cost of their health care” versus 31 percent saying “people on Medicare need to be more responsible for the cost of their healthcare in order to keep the program financially secure.”
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In 2007, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs asked a representative sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to pay more taxes in order to provide health coverage for everyone?” Nearly 60 percent were willing versus just 40 percent who were unwilling.
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They asked the same question about paying more in taxes for “early childhood education in kindergarten and nursery school.” Here, 64 percent were willing versus 33 percent unwilling.
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Finally, Page and Jacobs asked whether the EITC should be increased, decreased, or kept about the same. More than 90 percent wanted it increased or kept the same.
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There is only one significant exception to the popularity of existing social programs in America: welfare. In the GSS surveys, between 40 percent and 60 percent of Americans say we spend too much on welfare.
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Though the question doesn't specify the particular program, it's likely that most respondents have in mind AFDC, which was replaced in the mid-1990s by TANF. As Martin Gilens has documented, AFDC was uniquely unpopular with the American public.
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This owes to a variety of factors, according to Gilens, prominent among them race and media portrayals of the recipients. The perception is deeply ingrained. Despite the pronounced changes introduced by the 1996 welfare reform—strict time limits on benefit receipt, reduced benefit levels, stronger employment requirements—the GSS responses suggest little, if any, shift in public opinion about “welfare” since then.

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans have become more conservative in recent decades—the so-called age of Reagan.
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Have our views about government's role or specific programs shifted? For the most part, no. The share of Americans identifying as conservative and/or Republican increased a bit in the 1970s and 1980s. But views about government effectiveness and how
much we should be spending on particular policies have remained fairly constant.
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Many Americans dislike the idea of big government. But when we think about it in terms of specific programs, we're not at all averse to a government that is medium-sized or even large.

When the American public favors a proposed policy change, it is more likely to be adopted. When the public opposes a change, it is less likely to be adopted. That's the finding of a study titled “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy” by Benjamin Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, published in 1983.
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Page and Shapiro find considerable congruence in public opinion and policy changes in the United States from 1935 to 1979. They also find that public opinion influences policy changes rather than the other way around.

In a book published thirty years later, Martin Gilens looks at patterns between the mid-1960s and the mid-2000s.
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His findings echo those of Page and Shapiro. When only 5 percent of Americans favored a proposed policy change, as gauged by public opinion surveys, the change was adopted just 10 percent of the time. When 45–55 percent favored the change, it was adopted 25–30 percent of the time. When 95 percent were in favor, the proposed change was adopted 60 percent of the time.

Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson conducted a similar test but in a slightly different way.
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Rather than examine the relationship between public opinion and policy change for each specific issue, they constructed an index of public opinion liberalism and an index of policy liberalism and looked at how these indexes correlate over time. They too find strong indication of an association between public opinion and policy, and they too conclude that the relationship is causal.

What these types of studies can tell us is constrained by the limits of available survey data. Public opinion data don't exist for some
issues, and for others the questions don't effectively tap the issue at stake. Still, these findings suggest a basic harmony between what Americans want and what their policy makers give them.

From the perspective of democracy, that's a reassuring conclusion. But it raises a question about my expectation that government social policy will expand in coming decades: do we need strong public support beforehand in order to get new programs adopted or existing ones expanded?

No, we don't. Consider Martin Gilens's recent findings. In his data, if public support for a proposed policy change is in the neighborhood of 45–55 percent, the likelihood that the change will be adopted is 25–30 percent. In other words, even if public opinion is split, the change has a one in four chance of getting passed. Public support helps, but it isn't necessary.

Additional evidence comes from a study by Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs.
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Examining public opinion on the major social policy innovations of the 1930s and the 1960s, they find evidence of considerable ambivalence and/or opposition among ordinary Americans to the proposed programs. The public, according to Newman and Jacobs, had “mixed and contentious attitudes about activist government.”
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Policy advances owed mainly to the efforts of political leaders, particularly Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, presidents who “moved boldly into a policy vacuum or forged on against growing antagonism. They pushed and pulled legislators into creating and then sustaining the progressive history of the 1930s and 1960s that we now—mistakenly—see as a sea change in popular political culture.”
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Here, too, the message is that while public support increases the likelihood of policy advance, it isn't a necessary condition. Policy makers can overcome ambivalence among the citizenry.

Often, ordinary Americans aren't sure what they think about a social program until it has been around for a while. That's
hardly surprising; it's difficult to know ahead of time how, and how well, a program will function. Once people see a program in action, they are better able to form an opinion. If a program works well, and there don't appear to be any major adverse side effects, they tend to like it.

Since public views about programs tend to be stronger after they have been put in place, we might expect public opinion to have more influence on proposed changes to existing programs than on proposals for new programs. And since the public tends to like existing social programs, we might expect public opinion to act as a brake on proposals to cut back or remove them. This is exactly what Paul Pierson finds through his examination of changes in social policy in the United Kingdom during the Thatcher years and in the United States during the Reagan years.
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Both administrations were committed to reducing the size and scope of government, including social programs. Both put forward multiple proposals for cutbacks. Both were in power for a fairly lengthy period. Yet neither Thatcher nor Reagan had much success.

Popularity doesn't make a program invulnerable to retrenchment or removal. But it reduces the likelihood of that happening. This is a key reason why the trajectory of American social policy has been forward, and why we might reasonably expect that to continue.

Proponents of small government are adept at deploying what Albert Hirschman terms the “rhetoric of reaction”—arguments suggesting that efforts to enhance justice and fairness are misguided.
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Hirschman identifies three types: futility arguments, perversity arguments, and jeopardy arguments. Futility arguments hold that government programs fail to have any impact. For instance, public schools fail to educate because they face little or no competition. Perversity arguments contend that
government programs worsen the problem they aim to address. An example is the contention that generous government benefits discourage work and thereby increase poverty instead of reducing it. Jeopardy arguments claim that government programs threaten some other desirable outcome. For instance, if we increase government spending, we'll get less economic growth.

Will these types of arguments block future progress in American social policy? I suspect not. Futility, perversity, and jeopardy arguments seem compelling. That's why they are effective. Sometimes they are empirically true, but often they aren't. Hirschman points out that in centuries past these types of claims were made to oppose the introduction of democracy. It was suggested, for instance, that if voting rights were extended to the “ignorant masses,” they would elect a tyrant, who would subsequently abolish democracy (futility). Or democracy would result in the expropriation and redistribution of property, thereby wrecking the economy and making everyone poorer (jeopardy).

In principle, such claims are testable. But prior to the introduction of democracy, there was no evidence.

Until recently, that's been the case for many claims about the futility, perversity, or jeopardy of generous social programs. Social scientists have lacked sufficient data to subject those claims to empirical scrutiny. But this is changing. We're now in a much better position to evaluate these hypotheses, and our ability to do so will continue to improve going forward. Empirical assessment won't end the influence of such claims in policy debate, but it will reduce that influence enough to open up some political space.