Work Welfare and Partisan Change Katherine J. Cramer Department of Political Science University of Wisconsin – Madison Larry M. Bartels Department of Political Science Vanderbilt University Working Paper 3 -2020 Work, Welfare, and Partisan Change Larry M. Bartels Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University
[email protected] Katherine J. Cramer Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
[email protected] We examine Americans’ attitudes toward work and welfare, focusing specifically on the pivotal cohort of people who graduated from high school in 1965. Drawing on semi- structured interviews with some of the participants in the 1965-1997 Political Socialization Panel Study, now in their early seventies, we explore the role of work in shaping people’s identities, the impact of personal experience on their attitudes toward work and welfare, and how they navigate the difficult trade-off between wanting to provide for people’s needs and wanting to encourage self-reliance. Our interviews reinforce evidence from the original surveys suggesting that Republican partisanship has been both a cause and an effect of changing attitudes toward government involvement in ensuring jobs and living standards over the past half- century. The interviews also reveal fervent concerns about immigrants’ and African- Americans’ reliance on welfare, echoing a significant racialization of attitudes toward government provision of jobs and welfare between 1982 and 1997. Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2020. We are grateful to M. Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker for generously facilitating our extension of the Political Socialization Panel Study, and to Rosemary Walsh and participants in the Vanderbilt University RIPS lab for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this report.