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Replication Data for: Attitudinal consistency in citizens’ social policy preferences

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Attitudinal consistency in citizens’ social policy preferences
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GZBI4X
 
Creator Ares, Macarena
Häusermann, Silja
Enggist, Matthias
Pinggera, Michael
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Studies of public opinion on welfare policy implement increasingly concrete and complex survey measures that frequently assume relative preferences on the part of respondents. Yet, we lack evidence on whether voters hold such structured attitudes towards welfare policies. We rely on novel survey data from eight West European countries to study horizontal attitudinal constraint in welfare policy preferences. Addressing both logical and relational consistency, we find that most respondents hold structured welfare belief systems and relative preferences about where reform is more important, even when confronted with complex tasks and tradeoffs. Moreover, by addressing individual-level heterogeneity we show that differences related to socio-demographic factors and attitudes are rather minor. Consistent welfare attitudes are not exclusive to highly sophisticated individuals. These results validate the effort of implementing more fine-grained indicators of social policy preferences (and other policies) across the population.
 
Subject Social Sciences
attitudinal constraint
social policy
welfare politics
public opinion
survey research
 
Date 2023-11-09
 
Contributor Ares, Macarena