Distributive justice preferences are important because they can influence the policy orientations of political actors and can help create conditions conducive to policy change. Yet, these preferences have received relatively little scholarly attention in countries that are not included in major cross-country surveys such as Turkey. This article examines Turkish distributive justice preferences across four key social policy sectors: education; healthcare; old-age pensions; and unemployment insurance. The analysis draws on 2019 data from an original nationwide survey (n = 2,272), designed by a research team including the authors and implemented by a professional survey firm using multistage stratified random sampling. Our findings confirm that, as in mature welfare states, distributive justice preferences vary across social policy sectors in the Turkish case. However, the equality principle is strongly favored in three of the four areas, while equity is preferred only in old-age pensions, possibly reflecting policy feedback effects. In the context of high inequality and low social and institutional trust, we introduce distrustful egalitarianism as a concept to capture egalitarian preferences driven more by distrust of official allocation mechanisms than by purely ideological commitments to equality. These findings highlight the need for further research in middle-income countries with less mature welfare systems.

Social investment policies have introduced a shift in the normative underpinnings of European welfare states but are layered into compensatory and workfarist policies. This article questions the normative outcomes of social investment from a citizen perspective, asking how hybrid active labour market policies (ALMPs) shape citizen-level norms of social solidarity. Building on normative feedback theory, we conduct a comparative qualitative secondary analysis of focus-group datasets from France and Belgium (2006; 2019), where enabling instruments were gradually introduced between observation points. Based on a two-fold operationalization of citizen-level norms, we report that compensatory and workfarist cues dominate discussions with scarce reference to capacitation. The frames participants rely on feature normative tensions, particularly the ambivalent coexistence of compensation and individual responsibility. The normative feedback of ALMPs takes the form of a dilemma between generous-yet-stringent solidarity. Social investment policy norms have not (yet) reshaped citizen-level norms of social solidarity.

While public support is central to the problem‐solving capacity of the European Union, we know little about when and why the EU can increase its citizens’ support through spending. Extensive research finds that citizens living in countries that are net beneficiaries of the EU budget are more supportive of the EU, assuming that citizens care equally about all forms of spending. It is argued in this article, however, that the amount of spending is only part of the story. Understanding the effects of spending on support requires a consideration of how transfers are spent. Drawing on policy feedback theories in comparative politics, it is shown that support for the EU is a function of the fit between the spending area and economic need in individuals’ immediate living context. Results from a statistical analysis of EU spending on human capital, infrastructure, agriculture, energy and environmental protection in 127 EU regions over the period 2001–2011 corroborate this argument. As the EU and other international organisations become increasingly publicly contested, the organisations themselves may increasingly try to shore up public support through spending, but they will only be successful under specific conditions.

Many studies have shown that individuals who interact with government programs subsequently participate in politics at levels different from before, whether higher or lower. While most prior work examines the effect of policy recipiency, or program administration in one geographic location or at one snapshot in time, I study how the administration of Medicaid, a federal program administered by states, varies over time and by place, and how its variation in administration affects mass-level voter turnout. I argue that there are two highly salient sites of contact with the administrative state when considering effects on voter turnout: government programs and elections. I theorize that administrative burden from these sites creates interpretive effects on both those with direct public program experience and those whose experience is indirect, which shapes the likelihood of voting. Using a generalized differences-in-differences design and applying my separate, original measures of Medicaid and electoral burdens, I find that having a higher level of Medicaid burden resulted in a small but significant decrease in county-level turnout in recent national elections, net of Medicaid expansion status, burdens associated with registering to vote and voting, and other factors. These results imply that contact with the administrative state, via government program administration and elections, is a critical way in which policies shape mass-level political participation.

A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can shift voters’ electoral choices. Yet there remains a mismatch between reliance on aggregated municipal data and individual-level theories focused on retrospective rewards or reduced vulnerability to clientelism. Since CCTs also produce plausible spillovers on nonbeneficiaries, verifying who reacts, and how, is crucial to understanding their electoral effects. To empirically unbundle individual and spillover effects, the analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation between beneficiaries of Brazil’s Bolsa Família and those on the waiting list. The evidence suggests that CCTs strengthen beneficiaries’ attitudes against clientelism, but they vote no differently than nonbeneficiaries. However, spillovers are strong: As CCT coverage expands, both beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries turn against local incumbents. This pattern is inconsistent with existing theory, which relies on either polarization or positive spillovers. Instead, I propose a theory of collective confidence derived from strategic voting incentives in which CCT expansion fortifies all voters in resisting clientelism.

This study explores the link between receiving basic income support (BIS) and political alienation in Germany, with a focus on political trust and satisfaction with democracy. We argue that receiving BIS is associated with experiences of material and social exclusion and impairs subjective social integration. Against the background of major structural welfare reforms in recent decades, we assume that BIS recipients are likely to attribute responsibility for their socio-economic disadvantages to the wider political system. We use data from the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) for the years 2019–2021 and employ multivariate regression analysis. We find that political alienation is more likely to occur among recipients of BIS, especially long-term recipients, than among non-recipients. Social exclusion is an important mechanism: With a higher risk of material deprivation and fewer opportunities for social participation and civic engagement than non-recipients, BIS recipients are more likely to experience subjective social exclusion, which, in turn, contributes to their political alienation. Moreover, our study offers indications that trustful and supportive interactions with welfare authorities can mitigate tendencies of political alienation among BIS recipients.

The ways in which welfare state programs structure people’s lives have been a central focus of research on policy feedback. While there is rich literature in the USA about racialized experiences with the state, we know little about how immigration history intersects with racial background in moderating experiences with the state nor have there been many studies in other liberal welfare regimes outside the USA. Our study aims to fill this gap by exploring how citizenship status over generations intersects with racial background in structuring interactions with welfare state programs in Canada. Analyzing data from Democracy Checkup surveys spanning from 2020 to 2023, we focus on how needs, capabilities, and experiences may structure government contact and the extent to which these factors explain differences across citizenship and racial categories. We document a recurring difference in the amount of contact among racialized respondents—non-citizens and third-generation citizens—that cannot be explained by either need or capability. Interestingly, our findings suggest that while the greater contact among racialized non-citizens is evaluated more positively in terms of procedure, third-generation racialized citizens generally evaluate their higher contact more poorly. These findings point to the importance of understanding racialized experiences with the state through the lens of citizenship.

This article considers a significant but overlooked set of policy developments in the latter half of the twentieth century: the extension of collective bargaining rights to most health care workers, many of whom were formally excluded for three decades under the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments. Drawing on primary sources including archival records, an exhaustive review of congressional testimony, and rulings from the quasijudicial agency governing private sector industrial relations, this article shows that health care workers did so in two interrelated processes. First, in coordination with the civil rights movement, workers mobilized and used both disruptive and legal social movement tactics. Second, in doing so they drew the state into and revealed its position in the collective bargaining process between workers and health institutions, facilitating what is conceptualized as cross-domain policy feedback. Cross-domain policy feedback occurs when a policy in one domain (e.g., public health spending) influences the politics of a policy in a seemingly separate one (e.g., labor and employment relations). Such effects, this article suggests, are likely to occur when a policy is relatively large in scale, implicates actors with a diverse set of interests, and offers significant ambiguity and discretion in its implementation. Empirically, this article is the first to chart the institutionalization of collective bargaining rights for health care workers, among the largest group of private sector employees in the postindustrial economy. It also offers a new theoretical and conceptual framework through which to study the ways by which public policies reshape political dynamics—an enduring research agenda for students of American politics and policy.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.

Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.