How Culture Affects the Public's Welfare Attitudes?: A Comparative Study

Purpose and Background:

The public’s attitude toward welfare state plays an important role in formulation of government welfare policies. Previous research has investigated diverse factors that affect the public’s welfare attitudes. Traditionally, most of the studies focused on individual-level determinants including demographic characteristics and social class of individual citizens. However, this kind of individual-level approach has limitations to explain cross-national variations in welfare attitudes, ignoring contextual elements in a given country. Why different countries show different levels of welfare attitudes? To answer this question, country-level approach has examined the impact of institutional factors such as macroeconomic condition and political regimes on the public’s welfare attitudes. Beyond political and economic institutions, current comparative welfare debates pay special attention to culture to address cross-national differences in welfare attitudes. Many studies in political science reveal that culture is an implicit but principal component to construct social values as well as ideological preferences. Yet, very little research has comprehensively analyzed the influence of culture on the public’s welfare attitudes. Thus, this study empirically examined how different cultures affect the public’s welfare attitudes. Based on Inglehart and Baker (2005)’s modernization theory, a robust framework for differentiating cultures in various societies, this study compared 70 developing and developed countries.

Methods:

This study used secondary data from the World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 5 and Wave 6. We analyzed over 80,000 citizens from 70 countries, by aggregating un-weighted means for each individual-level variables within a given country into country-level covariates. The dependent variable, the level of public’s welfare attitudes, was measured by respondents’ opinion regarding government responsibility for welfare provision (10-point standardized scale). We employed Inglehart and Baker (2000)’s Four-Dimensional-Cultural-Value Scale to identify the dominant culture of each country, the independent variable. This multi-item scale quantifies the degrees of four culture types, (1) traditional vs. (2) secular-rational value and (3) authority vs. (4) self-expression value. We measured the aggregated means of respondents’ scores pertaining to these four values and assigned them to each country. To control for effects of institutional factors, we also included per capita GDP and the relative political ideology scores (RPIS).

Results:

We analyzed two separate regression models. Model 1 and 2 detected the effects of secular-rational value and self-expression value on the welfare attitude, respectively. Both models satisfied the goodness of model fit with p of F-score<.001 and VIF<2.5. In the Model 1, while per capita GDP and the RPIS were statistically significant, secular-rational value was not. Model 2 showed self-expression value significantly affects welfare attitude, controlling for per capita GDP and the RPIS. The results indicate countries where self-expression value is dominant are more likely to have pro-welfare attitudes.

Conclusions:

According to the modernization theory, while industrial phase of modernization emphasizes secular-rational value, post-industrial phase promotes self-expression value. The results of the study imply political and economic factors decide public’s welfare attitude in developing countries (industrial phase), whereas culture, particularly self-expression value, is an important factor in developed countries (post-industrial phase). We discussed research directions for cultural approach in social welfare study.