Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on November 22, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(4):589-618; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn053
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The End of Welfare as We Know It?
Durable Attitudes in a Changing Information Environment
Address correspondence to Joshua J. Dyck; e-mail: jdyck{at}buffalo.edu.
When white Americans think about welfare, they are likely to think about black Americans. The most prominent explanation for this phenomenon offered has been media coverage—newsmakers have presented welfare as an overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly bad social program. Most of the data used in studies that reach these conclusions, however, predate welfare reform. Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare has lost its place among America's most controversial issues. While there are many critics of the reform, many more declare it a success, and these elites are both Republican and Democrat. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public is favorably inclined toward the passed reforms. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence that the information environment surrounding welfare policy has changed. Given this, we pose the following research question: do negative attitudes about blacks continue to color people's willingness to spend money on welfare programs? We address this question by examining the predictors of opposition to welfare spending in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies. The evidence suggests that despite the changing information environment, welfare attitudes are as strongly racialized in 2004, as they were a decade earlier.
JOSHUA J. DYCK is with the Political Science Department, University at Buffalo, SUNY, 520 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA. LAURA S. HUSSEY is with the Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA. This paper is dedicated to the loving memory of Linda Faye Williams, an advisor and friend who was instrumental in the early development of this manuscript; Linda, we miss you very much. We also acknowledge the helpful comments of Geoff Layman, Karen Kaufmann, Jim Gimpel, and participants in the University of Maryland American Politics Workshop, as well as those of anonymous reviewers. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Public Policy Institute of California, the fine research assistance of Nicholas Seabrook at the University at Buffalo, and the kind assistance of Paul King at the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Any clairvoyance in this paper likely came from the careful and constructive criticism offered by our colleagues and mentors; all errors are our own.