Abstract
In this chapter the author returns to Mettler’s (The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) submerged state policies. Mettler’s work documents the reality that citizens often fail to recognize instances where government programs support their lives. This chapter examines the policy attitudes of individuals who benefit from three of the largest submerged state programs (home mortgage interest, retirement savings, and health insurance tax deductions) and shows how holding hypocritical attitudes toward more visible welfare policies depends on personality. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how conscientiousness leads these individuals to express a desire to reduce or eliminate more visible government programs like welfare in general and food stamps in particular, while benefiting themselves from submerged welfare policies. Interestingly, agreeableness appears to have the opposite effect.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Wisconsin Representative and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s comments about the inner city culture of men not wanting to work (Volsky 2014).
- 2.
Of course, this is a generalization. The exact amount of interest would depend on various terms and vary over the length of the loan. That is, the amount of interest could be as high as $30,000 the first year and diminish to $20,000 by year 15.
- 3.
How much an individual can deduct phases out as incomes increase over $166,800, so an individual with an income of $500,000 would only be able to claim about $21,700 of the $25,000 in interest they pay.
- 4.
All of the same control variables were include in these models. Table 5.3 focuses only on the results of the Big Five variables in order to conserve space. Full model results are available upon request.
- 5.
Since this is count data with over dispersion, I estimated a zero-inflated negative binomial model (Vuong = 41.46, pr. = 0.00). The Vuong test indicates that the zero-inflated version is preferred to a simple negative binomial model.
- 6.
The results of some of these models are not shown in order to conserve space, but are available upon request.
- 7.
It should be noted that conscientiousness is often found to be a cause of one’s ideology. In Chapter 2, it was shown to be negatively correlated with being a consistent liberal, however, it was not associated with being a consistent conservative. As a result, I tested the potential mediating effect that ideology might have on the connection between conscientiousness and hypocrisy, but found it to not be significant.
- 8.
One might think that this difference is due to the fact that (unlike with welfare and food stamp policy) this measure of hypocrisy does not use having a mortgage or IRA/401(k) as the hidden welfare state benefit, but rather having some type of government subsidized health insurance. However, this is not the case. If I measure health insurance hypocrisy as those who have a mortgage or IRA/401(k) benefit but oppose government subsidized health insurance, the result is the same. Conscientiousness is a strong positive indicator, agreeableness is a strong negative indicator, and being white has no discernible effect.
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Dusso, A. (2017). Hidden State and the Punitive Public. In: Personality and the Challenges of Democratic Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53603-3_5
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