IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ifs/fistud/v23y2002i4p539-558.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Following or Leading Public Opinion? Social Security Policy and Public Attitudes Since 1997

Author

Listed:
  • John Hills

Abstract

This paper examines New Labour's social security and related policies since 1997 in the light of evidence on public attitudes. The list of measures where policies have been in or have come into line with public attitudes is much longer than the list of measures where policies have been out of line with public attitudes or appear to have led them. One interpretation is that policy has been led by opinion surveys and focus groups, with opportunities lost to take more radical action and then persuade people of the need and justification for it. An alternative would be that policy has navigated with the grain of some of the more progressive parts of public opinion to achieve a result that has carried the public with it, in a way that would not have been sustainable if there had simply been an increase in the generosity of an unreformed social security system.

Suggested Citation

  • John Hills, 2002. "Following or Leading Public Opinion? Social Security Policy and Public Attitudes Since 1997," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 23(4), pages 539-558, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:ifs:fistud:v:23:y:2002:i:4:p:539-558
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gordon Anderson & Alessio Farcomeni & Grazia Pittau & Roberto Zelli, 2014. "A new approach to measuring and studying the characteristics of class membership: The progress of poverty, inequality and polarization of income classes in urban China," Working Papers tecipa-521, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    2. Karen Rowlingson & Amrita Sood & Trinh Tu, 2021. "Public attitudes to a wealth tax: the importance of ‘capacity to pay’," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 42(3-4), pages 431-455, September.
    3. Mijs, Jonathan Jan Benjamin, 2019. "The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy go Hand in Hand," SocArXiv dcr9b, Center for Open Science.
    4. Lin Yang, 2018. "The relationship between poverty and inequality: Resource constraint mechanisms," CASE Papers /212, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    5. Lin Yang, 2018. "The net effect of housing-related costs and advantages on the relationship between inequality and poverty," CASE Papers /211, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    6. Yang, Lin, 2018. "The relationship between poverty and inequality: resource constraint mechanisms," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103463, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. repec:aia:aiaswp:wp50 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Ben Spies-Butcher, 2014. "Marketisation and the dual welfare state: Neoliberalism and inequality in Australia," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 25(2), pages 185-201, June.
    9. Marjolein Jeene & Wim Oorschot & Wilfred Uunk, 2014. "The Dynamics of Welfare Opinions in Changing Economic, Institutional and Political Contexts: An Empirical Analysis of Dutch Deservingness Opinions, 1975–2006," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 115(2), pages 731-749, January.
    10. Abbott, Andrew & Jones, Philip, 2011. "Procyclical government spending: Patterns of pressure and prudence in the OECD," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 111(3), pages 230-232, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ifs:fistud:v:23:y:2002:i:4:p:539-558. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emma Hyman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifsssuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.