U.S. WELFARE ATTITUDES IN CROSS-NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

[This该提案是EuroCORES HumVIB竞赛资助的CRP的一部分。本项目采用一项新的全国性调查，从跨国视角系统地衡量美国人的福利态度。这项研究有两个互补的目标。一个是首次从非常成功的欧洲社会调查（ESS）中提取核心项目，以更好地比较欧洲国家和美国。跨国标准化的项目是必不可少的调查测量，这个项目将建立在ESS数据收集，扩展福利态度的测量到美国的关键案例。该项目的第二个主题目标是利用一个实验设计，其中可以裁定福利国家态度的因果来源的假设。嵌入式调查实验在推进态度和偏好形成的学术理解方面有相当大的希望。该项目的双重重点是框架（对社会政策或其受益者的描述各不相同）和赞助（这些描述的来源各不相同）。框架和赞助是社会和历史背景的基本要素，通常在民意调查中保持不变。建立在传统的社会调查，调查实验的方法学的好处是解开这些内容的背景，使有关特定的框架和竞争的赞助商的假设可以进行评估。该项目和数据收集为美国和欧洲学者提供了一个新的调查，以评估如何以及为什么社会政策态度在当代历史时期的变化。它为主要调查员和较大的欧洲研究小组（本项目是其中的美国部分）提供数据，以便进行基于调查的个人和多层次分析。随后的研究项目预计将提供新的解释，为什么大众对社会福利的看法在世界上最发达的国家继续存在差异。在实地嵌入式调查实验，该项目提供了新的见解背后的政策偏好形成的机制。这些实验有助于从跨国的角度更好地理解美国。希望通过这些实验产生的知识可以刺激实验调查在跨国研究中的进一步应用。

[This proposal is part of a funded CRP from the EuroCORES HumVIB competition.]This project uses a new national survey with which to systematically measure American welfare attitudes in cross-national perspective. This research has two complementary goals. One is to field for the first time core items from the highly successful European Social Survey (ESS) to better enable comparisons between European nations and the United States. Cross-nationally standardized items are essential to survey measurement, and this project will build from the ESS data collection, extending measurement of welfare attitudes to the key case of the United States. The project's second thematic goal is to make use of an experimental design in which hypotheses about causal sources of welfare state attitudes can be adjudicated. Embedded survey experiments hold considerable promise in advancing scholarly understanding of attitude and preference formation. The dual focus of this project is on framing (in which the description of a social policy or its beneficiaries are varied) and sponsorship (in which the source of these descriptions are varied). Together, framing and sponsorship are essential elements of social and historical context that are typically held constant in opinion surveys. Building from the conventional social survey, the methodological benefit of survey experiments is to unpack these elements of context so that hypotheses about specific frames and competing sponsors can be evaluated. This project and data collection provides American and European scholars with a new survey with which to evaluate how and why social policy attitudes vary in the contemporary historical era. It provides for the principal investigator and larger European research team (of which this project is the United States component) the data with which to conduct survey based individual and multi-level analysis. Subsequent research projects are expected to offer novel explanations of why mass opinion on social welfare continues to differ across the worlds most developed nations. In fielding embedded survey experiments, this project offers new insights into mechanisms behind the formation of policy preferences. These experiments contribute to a firmer understanding of the United States in cross-national perspective. It is hoped that knowledge generated through these experiments may stimulate further applications of experimental surveys in cross-national research.