Examining Sentiments Surrounding Guaranteed Income Pilot Interventions

Background:

In the past five years, over 150 Guaranteed Income (GI) pilots have been launched nationwide. To examine this increase in GI interest, existing research typically uses survey data to measure public opinion. We wanted to explore the dimensionality of public opinion by comparing national sentiments in the U.S. popular press with local sentiments in community leader interviews from a small city anchoring a Micropolitan Statistical Area in the Midwest with a GI pilot. By comparing more theoretical national sentiments with local sentiments connected to a specific GI pilot, we aim to better understand the public-level feasibility and acceptability of GI.

Methods:

We conducted sentiment analysis to compare national and local GI narratives. We first created a national dataset using the Global News Index and Extracted Features Repository from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. We then created two queries for U.S.-based articles published after 2017 containing the keywords, “guaranteed income,” “guaranteed annual income,” “direct cash transfer,” and “basic income.” 2017 was chosen because it was the year the GI program in Stockton, CA sparked a national level of interest. One query searched for these keywords in the article’s title, and the other in the article’s text yielded 173 and 2794 articles respectively. Next, with a manual examination, we discarded articles that were not explicitly about GI, leaving a dataset of 83 articles. After this, we constructed a local dataset using transcripts from 12 community leader interviews conducted in the small Midwest city with a GI pilot. Formatting the data, was accomplished with the “tidytext” R package to convert the articles and interview transcripts into a one-word-per-row format and removed stopwords (i.e. common words like “if,” “but,” “and”, “we”). Using the formatted data, we employed the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon for analysis, creating a list of the most prevalent words coded as “positive” and “negative”.

Results:

Six themes emerged when examining the top 25 words in all 4 dimensions utilized to examine the data - Local vs National and Positive vs Negative. The themes and their respective words were: 1) Work/Worth - “job”, “labor”, “wealth”; 2) The Deservingness Debate - “unemployed”, “gambling”, “mother”, “dependent”; 3) Who Knows What’s Best? - “talk”, “proving”, “assistance”; 4) Thriving vs Surviving - “fun”, “choice”, “extra”, “freedom”; 5) Funding and Implementation - “tax”, “government”, “public”, “community”; and 6) The GI Movement - “pandemic”, “understanding”, “momentum”. Across both the national and local datasets, “government,” “poverty,” and “tax” were frequently used negative words while “giving,” “food,” and “resources” were frequently used positive words.

Conclusion:

These sentiments reveal that the stigmas surrounding poverty and deservingness remain at the roots of contemporary cash assistance policy and must be challenged moving forward. As well, there a positive themes that recognize sometimes GI can benefit families and communities that need to be amplified. The analysis of themes also indicated that local leaders are generally aligned with the national conversation about GI interventions, which has focused on the viability of cash transfer interventions and the interconnected narratives of work and deservingness.