Culpability and Redistribution Concerns in Support for Struggling Workers and Firms
Affluent democracies, including the United States, recently experienced the two largest recessions since the Great Depression. During such periods, governments sometimes assist workers and firms with special programs, while in other cases they let the economic fallout take place without any. Interest group lobbying and elite politics are obviously central to these decisions, but policymakers also pay attention to public opinion in these situations.
Why does the public support assistance for workers and bailouts for firms in some cases, but not at other times? Tobias Heinrich and I investigate these questions in a recent article, “Deserving Government Assistance? Public Support for Aid to Struggling Firms and Workers”, now available online in the journal Political Behavior.
Studying how characteristics of firms and workers shape public support for government assistance and bailouts for them is important because public political debate exceeds what we know scientifically. The U.S. government provided direct financial assistance to both firms and workers, and early in the pandemic the public appeared generally supportive of these policies. Scholars have identified many factors that can shape perceptions of deservingness, that were typically developed in the context of struggling individuals.
In our study we focus on how culpability perceptions and need-based or redistributive concerns shape support for assistance for workers and firms, the latter of which have seldom been studied in this research context. It is very useful to consider workers and firms together because these are, in some ways, alternative approaches to dealing with economic troubles of the type we experienced during the pandemic.
Much existing research on deservingness focuses on how perceptions of the culpability of workers for their economic problems shapes beliefs about their worthiness for government support (Aarøe & Petersen, 2014; Applebaum, 2001; Baekgaard et al., 2021; Petersen et al., 2011).
However, we think it is also important to consider need-based or redistributive aspects, since recent research shows that there is sympathy and empathy toward the poor and negative affect toward the wealthy (Hansen, 2023; McCall, 2013; Piston, 2018; Schneider & Ingram, 1993; Sznycer et al., 2017; Witko & Moldogaziev, 2023), which affects perceptions of deservingness (Jilke & Tummers, 2018; Kreitzer & Smith, 2018; van Oorschot, 2000). Thus, we develop and use a deservingness framework that includes both culpability and need dimensions, which taps into redistributive concerns.
We also argue that need-based considerations may become especially important in evaluating the deservingness of firms, which often have wealthy executives, portrayed as out of touch with the average voter and tax-payer, and that these need-based or redistributive aspects may become more salient when inequality is growing and people question the fairness of the economic system (McCall, 2013).
Therefore, we expect that low-income workers and companies with lower-paid workforces and managers (CEOs) will be viewed as more deserving of government assistance in general, and that individuals concerned about economic inequality should be particularly sensitive to differences in need or affluence compared to those less concerned with inequality.
We rely on two conjoint survey experiments administered to over 1,200 adults each in the United States in Fall 2021 to test our expectations. In each, we present side-by-side profiles of either pairs of struggling firms or unemployed workers and ask the survey-taker to decide “which one is more deserving of government assistance”. The profiles for unemployed workers randomize attributes for the reason for job loss with varying degrees of culpability (e.g. government mandated pandemic shut downs to poor performance) and salary to tap into need, and a number of other attributes to make the profiles more realistic.
The profiles for struggling firms randomize analogous reasons for economic struggles (e.g. pandemic shutdowns and mismanagement), the typical income of employees, and the salary of the CEO, to assess need and affluence, along with a number of other contextual aspects. These randomizations approximate real world decisions regarding comparisons varying on many dimensions and, importantly, allow us to obtain causal effects of these attributes on public support for assistance. In addition, we examine how , we respondents’ concerns about inequality moderate these effects (Bansak, 2020).
We first present the results for the key variables for workers below (for full figures see the paper). We can see that workers who make more money are viewed as far less deserving than workers that earn less money. We also see that culpability matters too. People fired for poor performance were viewed as 36% less deserving (averaging across the population). We do not present the results here, but we also found that people who are very concerned about inequality view workers with higher incomes as less deserving.
We next present the analogous results for firms, and we find similar results. Firms with workers who make more money are viewed as less deserving of bailouts. Firms with CEOs that make more money are also viewed as less deserving, as are firms struggling due to mismanagement. We did not find that concerns about inequality moderated these relationships at all.
Our results provide support for the idea that deservingness beliefs are shaped by culpability and need-based considerations for both workers and firms. Firms and workers struggling due to pandemic shut downs are viewed as much more deserving than those struggling due to mismanagement or poor performance, respectively.
We also observe a clear preference to assist those with less income or wealth: workers that had a lower salary before unemployment and firms with CEOs and workers that are paid less are seen as substantially more deserving. In addition, individuals concerned about income inequality are especially likely to view low-income workers as more deserving than high-income workers. In addition to these specific findings, we can also conclude that people appear to evaluate the deservingness of firms in much the same manner as workers.
There is very little research on the deservingness of firms, so our study also raises a number of questions that should be addressed in future research. Our findings also have potential implications for other types of policies (e.g. tax policy) and bailouts for other struggling institutions or governments, like countries within the European Union or universities facing financial difficulties (Bechtel et al., 2014; Broz, 2005). We expect that other institutions would be evaluated in a similar manner, but more research should certainly examine this.
