S002238161400019xa

Crowding Out Culture: Scandinavians andAmericans Agree on Social Welfare in the Face ofDeservingness Cues

Lene Aarøe Aarhus University

Michael Bang Petersen Aarhus University

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely acrosscountries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfareopinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regardingrecipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutabledifferences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions.Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected inthe United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences whenfaced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades ofexposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare supportacross the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.

Social welfare spending and public support forsocial welfare benefits vary widely throughouttheWestern world (Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote

2001; Larsen 2006; Rothstein 1998).1 A key findingin the welfare state literature is, for example, theexistence of a transatlantic divide such that elec-torates in Europe, and especially Scandinavia, aremuch more in favor of providing assistance toindividuals in economic need than the Americanelectorate. In explaining such stable, cross-nationaldifferences in support for welfare, scholars haveoften emphasized the importance of deep-seatedcultural differences, sociostructural differences(particularly related to ethnic homogeneity), andinstitutional path dependencies (e.g., Alesina, Glaeser,and Sacerdote 2001; Jæger 2009; Larsen 2008; Lipset1996; Rothstein 1998).

At the same time, the empirical support for theseexplanations in the comparative welfare state literatureis mixed. Some studies find a link between a pro-posed explanatory factor and cross-national variation

in welfare support (Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote2001; Andreb and Heien 2001, 348‒49; Larsen 2006),others emphasize the weakness of the link (Bean andPapadakis 1998, 229; Svallfors 1997, 2003), whileothers fail to find any link (Gelissen 2000, 285; seealso discussion in Larsen 2006). In order to explainthese contrasting findings at the macro level, someresearchers in the welfare state literature have iden-tified problems in how cross-national differences insupport and proposed explanatory factors are mea-sured (Jæger 2009). Solving measurement problems iscertainly key in order to acquire further knowledge.Still, we suggest here that another hindrance forprogress is at the level of theory. Hence, to understanddynamics at the macro level, researchers are increas-ingly calling for attention to dynamics at the microlevel—that is, the psychological processes throughwhich welfare opinions are formed. Thus, as Korpiand Palme already emphasized, ‘‘the macro-microlinks among institutions and the formation of interestsand coalitions provides a major challenge’’ (1998, 682)

The Journal of Politics, Page 1 of 14, 2014 doi:10.1017/S002238161400019X

� Southern Political Science Association, 2014 ISSN 0022-3816

1Support for data collection was provided by grant 09-062770 from the Danish Research Council to Michael Bang Petersen. An onlineappendix with supplementary material containing additional information on measurement as well as additional analyses of robustness anddata and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002238161400019X.

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for the comparative welfare state literature. Ten yearslater, the situation had not changed. Brooks andManza,for example, argue that ‘‘mass opinion has beenlargely absent in the major theoretical approaches tounderstanding welfare states’’ (2007, 8). And Larsen(2006, 2) and Jordan (2010, 863) explicitly suggestthat the mixed results of state-of-the-art researchon welfare states may reflect that prior research hasnot adequately captured the complexity of publicopinion on social welfare.

In line with these calls, political psychologistshave recently uncovered important features concerningthe psychological predispositions underlying publicopinion about welfare state issues (Fong, Bowles, andGintis 2006; Gilens 2000; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al.2011, 2012; Skitka and Tetlock 1993; Weiner 1995).Importantly, whereas the macro-oriented welfare stateliterature has emphasized cross-national differences inwelfare state support, this micro-oriented public opin-ion literature has found the existence of cross-nationalsimilarities in the psychological predispositions under-lying welfare state support (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis2006; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2011, 2012).In essence, utilizing a ‘‘deservingness heuristic,’’ indi-viduals across cultural divides, welfare state regimes,ideology, and political sophistication support welfarebenefits for recipients who are perceived as hard-working and reject welfare benefits for recipients whoare perceived to be lazy.

This article reviews these recent findings on themicro dynamics of welfare state support and integratesthem into the macro literature on cross-national dif-ferences in welfare state support. Specifically, we arguethat underneath these relatively stable cross-nationaldifferences, a general psychology of help giving existsthat prompts people to pay attention to whetherwelfare recipients are lazy or making an effort.On this basis, we predict that when confronted withrelevant cues about individual welfare recipients,people across highly different welfare states easilycome to agree on whether that individual deservesthese benefits. We test this argument using surveyexperiments embedded in two large-scale, nationallyrepresentative web surveys collected in the UnitedStates and Denmark—two countries with very differentwelfare states, cultural values regarding individualism,and levels of ethnic homogeneity. Despite numerousdecades of exposure to different cultures of welfare,two-sentence descriptions suggesting whether a welfarerecipient is lazy or genuinely making an effort renderthe opinions in the American and Scandinaviansamples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.In the conclusion, we discuss how these findings can

contribute to solving enduring puzzles in research onthe macro patterns of welfare state support.

Support for Social Welfareacross Nations

A key observation in the welfare state literature is thatsubstantial cross-national differences exist in socialwelfare spending and public support for social welfareand that these differences have existed over longperiods of time. In their analyses of social spendingin the EU and United States since the late nineteenthcentury, Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote (2001) showthat since the beginning of the twentieth century, socialspending has been lower in the United States than inEurope, and the gap between the two has increasedover time. Furthermore, in a comparative study of 24countries, Blekesaune and Quadagno emphasize that‘‘[o]ur main finding is that public attitudes towardwelfare policies vary between nations’’ (2003, 424; seealso Andreb and Heien 2001; Bean and Papadakis1998; Edlund 2007; Lipset 1996, 74‒75).

Many studies have focused on the differencesin support between so-called liberal welfare states(with widespread use of means testing and lowbenefit levels) and so-called social democratic welfarestates (with generous programs and benefits grantedas a matter of right) (Esping-Andersen 1990). Theseclasses of welfare states constitute opposing poleswith regard to levels of redistribution and marketintervention and, as evidenced in the literature onwelfare support, also with regard to the extent ofpublic support. Svallfors (1997) and Edlund (1999),for example, observe that social democratic welfarestates (concentrated in Scandinavia, including Denmark,Norway, and Sweden) are characterized by strongsupport for welfare state intervention, whereas liberalwelfare states such as the United States are character-ized by low support for government redistribution.Many other studies echo this conclusion (e.g., Alesina,Glaeser, and Sacerdote 2001; Andreb and Heien 2001;Larsen 2006; Rothstein 1998; Svallfors 1997, 2003).

Prior research has emphasized a number of factorsdriving such cross-national differences in support ofsocial welfare. One prominent hypothesis in the welfarestate literature is that welfare regimes constitute social-izing forces affecting public opinion (Jæger 2009; Larsen2006; Rothstein 1998). According to this perspective,depending on their design, welfare institutions mayeither build large majorities supporting their develop-ment or produce opposition to further expansion of

2 lene aarøe and michael bang petersen

the welfare state (Jordan 2010, 863; Korpi and Palme1998; Rothstein 1998; see also Arts and Gelissen 2001;Edlund 1999; Larsen 2008; Jæger 2009; Pierson 2001).Given the widespread use of rights-based welfareprograms, the Scandinavian benefit schemes extendto the middle class, producing broad, vested interestsin the continued existence of the welfare state (Pierson2001). In the United States, by contrast, the targetingof benefits to those with greatest need creates opposi-tion against the welfare state among a middle class thatdoes not benefit (Korpi and Palme 1998). In addition tothis political logic, other institutionalist explanationshave argued that different institutions foster differentmoral logics (Rothstein 1998). In particular, thewidespread use of needs testing in liberal welfare statesis argued to prompt the public to keep a watchful eyeon whether recipients deserve the benefits they receiveand, by implication, induce higher levels of welfareskepticism (see also Larsen 2006).

Other research has emphasized the long-termrole of religion and cultural values and traditions inshaping patterns of welfare state development andattitudes toward social welfare (e.g., Jordan 2010, 863;Larsen 2008, 146; Lipset 1996). Zaller and Feldman(1992, 272‒73, 299) thus emphasize how conservativesin the United States can easily defend opposition tosocial welfare by appeals to values of individualismand limited government, whereas liberal supporters ofthe welfare state lack a clear ideological justificationfor their position (297; see also Gould and Palmer1988, 428). In contrast, according to this perspective,the high levels of support in the Scandinavian welfarestates reflect a deep culture of collectivism that empha-sizes equality and egalitarianism (Twigg 2010, 1691).

Finally, a third approach explains cross-nationaldifferences in social welfare attitudes with differencesin the degree of ethnic homogeneity (e.g., Alesinaand Glaeser 2004; Gould and Palmer 1988; Soroka,Johnston, and Banting 2007). In this perspective, themassive support for social welfare in Scandinaviancountries is linked to their high levels of ethnic homo-geneity, meaning that redistribution is a within-groupphenomenon between similar individuals. In theUnited States, conversely, skepticism regarding thewelfare state reflects that redistribution is a between-group phenomenon, where a ‘‘we’’ is required totransfer benefits to an ethnically and racially different‘‘them.’’

In sum, the literature on understanding the factorsshaping cross-national differences in support for socialwelfare points to explanations that emphasize stablepath dependencies and the importance of deep-seatedcultural and sociostructural differences.

The Deservingness Heuristic andWelfare Attitudes across Nations

In his seminal book on public opinion, Zaller char-acterizes opinions as a ‘‘marriage of information andpredisposition: information to form a mental pictureof the given issue, and predisposition to motivatesome conclusion about it’’ (1992, 6). In this termi-nology, differences in support of social welfare acrosscountries could originate either from cross-nationaldifferences in predispositions or from cross-nationaldifferences in the information available in opinionformation. The emphasis on institutional, cultural,and structural factors as explanations of cross-nationaldifferences in support of social welfare suggests thatcross-national differences in support of social welfareare predispositional; that is, deep-seated and difficultto change. At the same time, a recent but growingbody of evidence on the psychology underlying socialwelfare attitudes has emphasized—as reviewed below—the high degree of similarity across cultures at the levelof predispositions with regard to opinions about whodeserves welfare and who does not (Fong, Bowles, andGintis 2006; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2011, 2012).This possibly suggests that cross-national differences inwelfare support stem more from differences in availableinformation, such as media stories and mental pictures,than from differences in the psychological predisposi-tions used to process this information. If valid, thencross-national differences in welfare support aremutable despite deep institutional, cultural, andstructural differences and can, under the right circum-stances, quickly change. In this section, we develop thisargument in detail.

The Deservingness Heuristic

In their everyday lives, people continuously judgewhether to help others in need (e.g., the beggar on thestreet, their friend who is in need of money, theiroverburdened colleague). Psychologists have shownthat such judgments are highly structured: needyindividuals who are viewed as being responsiblefor their own plight are judged as undeserving ofhelp, whereas those who are viewed as victims ofcircumstances beyond their own control are judgedas deserving (Feather 1999; Weiner 1995). Withinpolitical science, there is growing recognition of theimportance of heuristics in political attitude formation(Lau and Redlawsk 2006; Sniderman, Brody, andTetlock 1991). On this basis, studies have argued thatthis ‘‘deservingness heuristic’’ (cf. Petersen 2012) not

crowding out culture 3

only influences everyday judgments about interper-sonal help giving but also constitutes a key psycho-logical basis for judgments about political help giving;that is, social welfare (Gilens 2000; Larsen 2006;Oorschot 2000; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2012;Skitka and Tetlock 1993).

Psychologists have studied and verified the oper-ations of the deservingness heuristic across numerouscultures, including the United States (Weiner 1995),Canada (Meyer and Mulherin 1980), Japan (cf. Weiner1995), and Germany (Appelbaum 2002). Summarizingsuch studies, Weiner (1995, 166) concludes that thedeservingness heuristic is a ‘‘pancultural’’ mechanismfor regulating help giving. Consistent with this, studiesin political science have found that social welfare isrejected for recipients perceived as lazy but supportedfor recipients perceived as unlucky across highlydifferent countries (see, e.g., Oorschot 2000; Petersen2012; Petersen et al. 2012). In one large analysis, forexample, Petersen et al. (2012) showed the existence ofa positive correlation between laziness perceptions andwelfare opposition in 49 out of 49 studied countriesfrom around the world (including such differentcountries as the United States, Peru, Germany, Russia,South Korea, Australia, and Nigeria), and the correla-tion was significant at conventional levels in all but asingle country.2 According to research on the deserv-ingness heuristic, people across cultures are againstproviding welfare to those who are unwilling to investeffort to improve their circumstances (‘‘the lazy’’) butare supportive of welfare benefits to those making aneffort and trying but failing due to forces beyond theircontrol (‘‘the unlucky’’).

Input to the Deservingness Heuristic:Stereotypes versus Cues

In the above perspective, citizens everywhere partlyform welfare opinions on the basis of a deep-seatedheuristic: the deservingness heuristic. This invites thehypothesis that cross-national differences in welfaresupport emerge not from different psychological pre-dispositions but from different perceptions of thosebenefiting from the welfare system. In many ways,this argument aligns with the recent focus in parts ofthe welfare state literature on the role of stereotypes

(Gilens 2000; Larsen 2006). In this literature, it hasbeen argued that a country’s welfare institutions andlevels of ethnic homogeneity influence welfare sup-port, because these factors influence the stereotypesthat individuals tend to form. For instance, Larsen(2006; Larsen and Dejgaard 2013) argues that theScandinavian welfare states foster the stereotype thatwelfare recipients are making an effort but fall victimto forces beyond their control (and, hence, promptpeople to categorize them as ‘‘deserving’’), whereasthe U.S. welfare state fosters the stereotype thatwelfare recipients are lazy (hence, prompting peopleto categorize them as ‘‘undeserving’’; see alsoRothstein 1998).3

According to the standard definition, stereotypesare ‘‘beliefs about the characteristics, attributes, andbehaviors of members of certain groups’’ (Hilton andVon Hippel 1996, 240). Social psychologists commonlycharacterize stereotypes as resource-saving devices thatare used in human cognition to simplify informationprocessing and attitude formation (e.g., Allport 1954;Bodenhausen and Lichtenstein 1987; Macrae, Milne,and Bodenhausen 1994). In particular, psychologistshave argued that stereotypes are cognitive devices usedfor making judgments under informational uncertainty(Macrae, Milne, and Bodenhausen 1994).4 Throughthe assignment of individuals to meaningful socialcategories, stereotyping simplifies judgment whenother cues are limited, because it provides an alternatesource of information in the form of the contentof beliefs about the category (Macrae, Milne, and

2To account for this universal existence of the deservingnessheuristic, recent research has utilized principles from evolution-ary psychology and argued that the deservingness heuristic couldreflect biological adaptations designed to regulate help givingover human evolution (see Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2012).

3While there is evidence of the association between institutionsand stereotypes, the exact mechanisms behind these associationsare less clear. One potential mechanism relates to the higherbenefit levels of universal welfare states, which makes socialwelfare recipients more able to dress and behave in line with themajority population and, hence, seem like ‘‘one of us’’ (Larsen2006). Another potential mechanism relates to public discus-sions, where the existence of means testing in liberal welfare statesmakes it easier for media and political elites to create a discourseabout some recipients being undeserving (i.e., not meeting thecriteria for eligibility; see Larsen and Dejgaard 2013; Rothstein1998). Yet another mechanism could relate to self-reinforcingdynamics from the effects of so-called ‘‘stereotype threat’’ (see,e.g., Spencer and Castano 2007). Stereotype threat relates to theobservation that knowledge of negative stereotypes in itself drivesdown the performance of the stereotyped group and, hence, ifnegative stereotypes about the performance of welfare recipientsare established in liberal welfare states, these could be self-reinforcing.

4This, of course, does not mean that stereotypes are accurate. Theaccuracy of stereotypes depends on the accuracy of the in-formation on which they are formed. In the context of socialwelfare, for example, Gilens (2000) has documented widespreadbias in the information provided by media sources.


Bodenhausen 1994, 37). In other words, stereotypesprovide people with a substitute for more specificcues when making judgments about people withwhom they are not acquainted. Consistent with this,prior research in psychology demonstrates that, inthe face of clear cues about the motivations andhabits of specific people or groups, people tend torely much less on relevant stereotypes when formingimpressions of them (Crawford et al. 2011; Kruegerand Rothbart 1988; Kunda and Sherman-Williams1993; Petersen & Aarøe 2013; for further discussion,see Petersen 2009).

If welfare support indeed emerges as the interplaybetween stereotypes about the efforts of welfarerecipients and the universal deservingness heuristic,these observations have important implications forour understanding of cross-national differences inwelfare support. Specifically, it suggests that despitelifetimes of exposure to different welfare institutions,cultures, and sociostructural conditions, people fromdifferent countries should easily come to agree onissues of social welfare. If cross-national differencesrely on differences in available stereotypes aboutwhether most welfare recipients are lazy or unlucky,these differences should disappear when individualsare asked to make judgments on the basis of new,clear cues suggesting that a specific recipient is one orthe other. That is, while Americans believe that mostwelfare recipients are lazy and Scandinavians thatmost are unlucky, people across these highly differentregions should provide convergent opinions whendirectly confronted with clearly lazy or clearly unluckyrecipients. These individuating cues should (1) bepicked up by the deservingness heuristic, (2) deactivatethe stereotypes underlying national differences, and(3), as a consequence, cause opinions to convergeacross nations.

Research Design and Data

To test this argument, we collected two parallelonline web surveys in the United States and Denmark(n5 1,009 in the United States and 1,006 in Denmark).In both countries, the data were collected by theYouGov survey agency. Approximately nationallyrepresentative samples were drawn from the agency’sstanding web panels. The samples were randomlyselected from the web panels with stratified samplingused to match the sample proportions to nationalproportions on the dimensions of gender, age ($ 18,# 70), and geography (state in the U.S. case, regionin the Danish case).

We focus on the United States and Denmark asour sites of study, as these two counties differ sub-stantially on all of the factors that previous researchhas deemed important in explaining cross-nationaldifferences in welfare state support: the structure ofwelfare state institutions, degree of individualism,and levels of ethnic homogeneity. First, the UnitedStates is regarded as the prime example of a liberalwelfare state, whereas Demark is a classic example ofthe Scandinavian social democratic welfare state(Esping-Andersen 1990). Compared to the liberalU.S. welfare state that relies on means testing on asubstantial scale, the Danish welfare state is charac-terized by universal benefits granted as a matter ofright. Furthermore, compared to the liberal welfarestate in the United States, the universal Danish welfareregime is characterized by relatively high social transferregimes (including unemployment benefits; Jensen2008). Still, it should be noted that the Danish welfarestate, despite its universalistic nature, does requireunemployed people to engage in job-seeking activitiesand labor-market activation schemes in return fortheir unemployment benefits (Vikstrom, Rosholm,and Svarer 2011, 6–7). Compared to liberal welfarestates like the United Kingdom and the United States,however, the Danish workfare strategy has beenimplemented with a focus on ‘‘empowerment ratherthan control and punishment’’ (Torfing 1999, 5).Thus, in welfare regime terms, the United States andDenmark differ on fundamental parameters as centralexamples of the liberal and universal welfare states,respectively. Second, the United States has a highlyindividualistic culture (Gilens 2000; Lipset 1996),whereas Danish culture is marked by a number ofcollective elements (Nelson and Shavitt 2002). Finally,the United States is characterized by considerableethnic fragmentation (Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote2001), whereas Denmark is one of the most ethnicallyhomogenous countries in the Western World (Fearon2003). From this perspective, the United States andDenmark constitute a Most Different Systems Design(see also Petersen 2012, Petersen and Aarøe 2013).

Testing our arguments requires three measures:(1) a measure of default stereotypes about welfarerecipients’ efforts, (2) a measure of welfare opinionwhen people form opinions about social welfareunder informational uncertainty, and (3) a measureof welfare opinion when people form opinions aboutsocial welfare under informational certainty. We pre-dict that people in the United States and Denmarkwill have markedly different default stereotypes aboutwelfare recipients and that these stereotypes createdifferences in welfare support in the face of limited


information. In the face of clear cues about thedeservingness of welfare recipients, however, theinfluence of stereotypes should be strongly reducedand cause cross-national opinions to converge.

To measure stereotypes about social welfarerecipients, we rely on answers from a free-associationtask. Specifically, respondents were asked to write thewords they would use to describe people who receivesocial welfare in up to 20 boxes, one word in eachbox. As part of a larger coding scheme, two studentcoders then coded the content of the respondents’associations. Based on the control dimension identi-fied by van Oorshot (2000), the coders registered thenumber of words for each respondent suggesting thatwelfare recipients are associated with being lazy andthe number of words suggesting that recipientsare associated with being unlucky but industrious.5

We focus on stereotypes related to being lazy andunlucky, respectively, as they constitute the keyinput to the deservingness heuristic (Gilens 2000;Oorschot 2000; Petersen 2012; Petersen et al. 2012).From the student codings of the number of lazinessand unluckiness associations, we created three mea-sures capturing respondents’ stereotypes of socialwelfare recipients. First, we counted the number oflaziness-relevant associations returned by the indi-vidual respondent to obtain a measure of the degreeto which welfare recipients are stereotyped as ‘‘lazy’’(mean 5 0.55, SD 5 0.95). Second, we countedthe number of effort-relevant associations returnedby each respondent to obtain a measure of thedegree to which they are stereotyped as ‘‘unlucky’’(mean 5 0.35, SD 5 0.60). Third, we created ameasure of the overall dominance of stereotypesof welfare recipients being lazy relative to unluckyby subtracting the number of ‘‘unlucky’’ associationsfrom the number of ‘‘lazy’’ associations (mean 5 0.20,SD5 1.13). This measure provides an easily interpret-able summary measure of the content of respondent’sstereotypes.6

We rely on an experiment to investigate howpeople form welfare opinions in the face of certainand uncertain information, respectively. The uniquestrength of the experimental method is that it max-imizes control and consequently allows for causalinferences. In the experiment, the respondents wereasked about their support for a specific welfarepolicy—social welfare benefits—after they had beenexposed to one of three descriptions of a social welfarerecipient. In the three descriptions, we manipulatedthe presence of clear cues about social welfare recip-ients’ deservingness (present vs. not present) and thedirection of those cues (i.e., depicting social welfarerecipients as lazy vs. unlucky). Specifically, the exper-iment included the following three conditions (fromPetersen et al. 2012), each depicting a social welfarerecipient: ‘‘Imagine a man who is currently on socialwelfare’’ (the ‘‘Recipient with No Cues’’ condition);‘‘Imagine a man who is currently on social welfare. Hehas always had a regular job, but has now been thevictim of a work-related injury. He is very motivatedto get back to work again’’ (the ‘‘Unlucky Recipient’’condition); and ‘‘Imagine a man who is currently onsocial welfare. He has never had a regular job, but heis fit and healthy. He is not motivated to get a job’’(the ‘‘Lazy Recipient’’ condition). Each respondentwas randomly assigned to read one of these descrip-tions. To measure opposition to social welfare,respondents were then asked, ‘‘To what extent doyou disagree or agree that the eligibility require-ments for social welfare should be tightenedfor persons like him?’’ Answers were measured ona 7-point scale ranging from ‘‘Strongly disagree’’ to‘‘Strongly agree’’ (mean 5 0.56 on a scale ranging0‒1; SD 5 .35). ‘‘Don’t know’’ answers were alsorecorded and subsequently excluded from theanalyses.7

Finally, we also measure relevant demographiccontrol variables including gender, age, and education.Due to differences in the national education systems,education is categorized on a 5-point scale in the U.S.sample and a 7-point scale in the Danish sample.In both samples, the education measure was recodedto vary between 0 and 1 with higher values indicatinghigher education.

5Each respondent on average listed 3.37 meaningful associationsin the free-association task (SD 5 2.90).

6A key added advantage of this summary measure relative toother potential ways of calculating a summary measure is that thepresent calculation allows us to keep the entire sample in theanalyses. An obvious alternative would be to use the ratiobetween the number of laziness and unluckiness associations.However, as some respondents did not list any laziness orunluckiness associations, this calculation would generate a highnumber of missing observations caused by attempting to divideby zero. This would decrease the generalizability of the findings.Importantly, all of the findings reported using the differencemeasure of dominance of laziness stereotypes can be replicatedusing the alternative ratio measure (see the online appendix).

7A randomization check was conducted to see that the treat-ment and control groups were balanced and did not differ ondemographic background variables. No significant differenceswere found across the experimental groups with regard todistribution on age (Chi2 (104) 5 96.34, p 5 0.691), gender(Chi2 (2) 5 3.77, p 5 0.151) and education (Chi2 (16) 5 14.05,p 5 0.595). These findings support that the randomization wassuccessful.


Results

We begin the analyses by testing the classical expec-tation that clear cross-national differences exist instereotypes about welfare recipients. To test thisprediction, we rely on an independent samples t-testto test the mean difference between U.S. and Danishrespondents in the number of associations related towelfare recipients being lazy and unlucky, respec-tively, and the overall measure of the dominance ofthe former types of stereotypes of welfare recipientsbeing lazy rather than unlucky. The findings areillustrated in Figures 1‒2.

As Figure 1 illustrates, the American respondentson average list .61 ‘‘lazy’’ associations about socialwelfare recipients, whereas the Danish respondents listonly .49. Thus, the American respondents on averagelist .12 more ‘‘lazy’’ associations than the Danishrespondents (p 5 .005). Conversely, the Americanrespondents on average list only .29 associationsdepicting social welfare recipients as hard-workingbut unlucky, whereas respondents in the Danishsample on average list .42 such associations. Thus,the Danish respondents on average list .13 more‘‘unlucky’’ associations than respondents in theAmerican sample (p , .001). Furthermore, as illus-trated in Figure 2, the American respondents onaverage list .32 more ‘‘lazy’’ than ‘‘unlucky’’ associations

when describing social welfare recipients. In contrast,the Danish respondents on average only list .07 more‘‘lazy’’ than ‘‘unlucky’’ associations. This implies thatthe dominance of laziness stereotypes is more than4.6 times larger in the American sample than theDanish sample. This difference is statistically significant(p , .001).8

Thus, the findings in Figures 1‒2 are consis-tent with the classic expectation of clear cross-national differences in stereotypes about welfare

FIGURE 2 Dominance of ‘‘Lazy’’ Stereotypes byCountry

FIGURE 1 Average Number of Associationsabout Social Welfare Recipients byStereotype Category and Country 8There is an interesting overlap between these results from the

literature on the deservingness heuristic and the broaderpsychological literature on person perception. As Fiske,Cuddy, and Glick (2007) summarize, person perceptions varyacross two dimensions: a dimension of warmth (are socialintentions good or bad?) and a dimension of competence (isthe person able to carry out these intentions?). The perceptionsalong the first dimension are formed first, more quickly, andwith more behavioral implications. There is a close fit betweenthe dimension of warmth and the perceptions that thedeservingness heuristic takes as input. Consistent with theprimacy of this dimension, previous research shows thatdeservingness judgments on social welfare are uniquely tiedto perceptions of the motivations of welfare recipients—andnot to perceptions of the competences (i.e., intelligence) ofwelfare recipients (Gilens 2000; Petersen et al. 2012). Analysesof the data in the present study provide additional support forthe lower of importance of competence perceptions. Hence,while we find cross-national differences in the United Statesand Denmark on stereotypes about laziness, we do notfind differences in stereotypes about competence (t 5 0.12,p 5 .90). Furthermore, in the control condition of theexperiment, there is no correlation between stereotypes aboutcompetence and attitudes across the two countries (r 5 2.06,p 5.15). For a description of the measure of stereotypes aboutcompetence, see the online appendix.


recipients. In line with prior research, we observethat individuals coming from a liberal welfarestate regime depict social welfare recipients as pre-dominantly lazy, whereas individuals from a socialdemocratic welfare regime are much more likely todescribe social welfare recipients as people who aremaking an honest effort but have fallen victim tobad luck.

This preliminary finding leads us to the questionof the effect of clear cues about social welfare recipients’deservingness on these cross-national differences.We suggest that people will agree on social welfareacross institutional and cultural differences whencues about recipients’ deservingness are present. Totest this, we use ordinary least squares (OLS)regression and, for each experimental condition,estimate the effect of the respondent’s country onopposition to social welfare controlling for age,education, and gender. The findings are reported inTable 1 and illustrated in Figure 3. Opposition tosocial welfare ranges on a 0‒1 scale; higher valuesindicate stronger opposition to social welfare. TheUnited States is coded as 0 on the country variable,Denmark as 1.

As can be seen in Table 1, Model I and Figure 3,Column 1, when no cues about the social welfarerecipient are present, we again observe clear cross-national differences in opposition to social welfare.Specifically, consistent with the findings in Figures 1‒2and prior research, the findings demonstrate thatrespondents in the Danish sample are clearly lessopposed to granting social welfare to the target person

in the experiment than the American respondents(b 5 2.09, p , .001).

Importantly, however, the findings in Table 1,Models II-III, and Figure 3, Columns 2‒3, alsodemonstrate that these cross-national differences inopposition to social welfare are crowded out whencues about the deservingness of the social welfare

TABLE 1 Opposition to Social Welfare by Experimental Condition and Country

‘‘Recipient with No Cues’’Condition (Model I)

‘‘Lazy Recipient’’Condition (Model II)

‘‘Unlucky Recipient’’Condition (Model III)

Constant .63***(.05)

.73***(.05)

.41***(.05)

Country (Denmark)1 -.09***(.02)

.03(.02)

-.01(.02)

Female .002(.02)

.04(.02)

-.03(.02)

Age -.001(.001)

.001(.001)

-.002*(.001)

Education .01(.04)

-.05(.04)

.05(.05)

R2 .03 .02 .01N 613 651 642

Note: Entries are unstandardized ordinary least squares (OLS) regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. The dependentvariable is opposition to social welfare, with higher values indicating more support for tighter eligibility requirements (i.e., higher valuesindicate a more opposition to social welfare). 1Reference category for country variable is ‘‘United States.’’ *p , .05, **p , .01,***p , .001, two-tailed t-test.

FIGURE 3 Opposition to Social Welfare byExperimental Condition and Country


recipient are directly provided. Thus, when the manon social welfare is described as lazy, both theAmerican and Danish respondents alike are predom-inantly opposed to granting social welfare, and thereis no significant effect of country (b 5 .03, p 5 .182).Likewise, when the man on social welfare is describedas unlucky, both the American and the Danishrespondents are largely in favor of granting socialwelfare, and again there is no significant effect ofcountry (b 5 ‒.01, p 5 .645). Further analyses withregression models including interaction terms betweencountry and experimental conditions show that thesedifferences in the effects of country across theexperimental conditions are significant (p 5 .025and p , .001 for the country3 condition interactionfor the ‘‘unlucky’’ and ‘‘lazy’’ condition, respectively).These observations support that clear deservingness-relevant cues about social welfare recipients can crowdout the national differences in social welfare attitudes,which prior research otherwise emphasizes as a productof deep-seated structural and cultural differences andlong-standing institutional path dependencies.9

These findings lead us to the question of theeffect of clear cues on the impact of stereotypes onsocial welfare attitudes. We expect that the availabilityof certain information makes cross-national opinionsconverge, because this availability makes reliance onstereotypes superfluous for making judgments aboutrecipient deservingness. Hence, the availability of cuesabout welfare recipients should crowd out the effect ofstereotypes in the opinion-formation process. To testthis, we regress opposition to social welfare on theexperimental conditions and the dominance of lazinessstereotypes, controlling for gender, education, and agein the U.S. and Danish samples. The ‘‘Recipient withNo Cues’’ condition is coded as reference category onthe experimental variables. Again, opposition to socialwelfare ranges on a scale from 0 to 1 and higher

values indicate stronger opposition to social welfare.Higher positive values on the measure of dominanceof ‘‘lazy’’ relative to ‘‘unlucky’’ stereotypes indicatethe higher dominance of ‘‘lazy’’ stereotypes, andnegative values indicate a dominance of ‘‘unlucky’’stereotypes. The findings are reported in Table 2,Models I‒II and illustrated in Figure 4, Panels A‒B.

As can be seen from the findings in Table 2, theeffect of stereotypes on opposition to social welfare issignificantly conditioned by the experimental treat-ments in both the U.S. sample (b5 ‒.05, p5 .008 andb 5 ‒.07, p , .001) and Danish sample (b 5 ‒.06,p 5 .003, b 5 ‒.07, p 5 , .001). As illustrated bythe solid gray lines in Figure 4, Panels A‒B, when nocues regarding the deservingness of the social welfarerecipient are present, there is a clear and significanteffect of stereotypes on opposition to social welfarein both the U.S. and Danish samples (bU.S. 5 .08,

TABLE 2 The Crowding-Out Effect of MinimalCues on the Impact of Stereotypes

Opposition toSocial Welfare

United States Denmark

Constant .57***(.04)

.45***(.04)

‘‘Lazy Recipient’’ conditiona .21***(.02)

.34***(.02)

‘‘Unlucky Recipient’’conditiona

-.21***(.02)

-.14***(.02)

Dominance of ‘‘lazy’’stereotypes

.08***(.01)

.11***(.01)

‘‘Lazy Recipient’’ condition3 dominance of ‘‘lazy’’stereotypes

-.05**(.02)

-.06**(.02)

‘‘Unlucky Recipient’’condition 3 dominance of‘‘lazy’’ stereotypes

-.07***(.02)

-.07***(.02)

Female -.01(.02)

.02(.02)

Education .05(.04)

-.01(.03)

Age , -.00(.001)

, .00(, .00)

R2 .30 .40N 958 948

Note: Entries are unstandardized ordinary least squares (OLS)regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. Thedependent variable is opposition to social welfare, with highervalues indicating more support for tighter eligibility requirements(i.e., higher values indicate more opposition to social welfare).aReference category on the experimental variable is ‘‘Recipientwith No Cues’’ condition. *p , .05, **p , .01, ***p , .001,two-tailed t-test.

9According to our argument and the analyses presented inFigures 1 and 2, Americans should be more likely to perceivethe lazy welfare recipient as ‘‘typical,’’ whereas Danes should belikely to perceive the unlucky welfare recipient as ‘‘typical.’’ Theanalysis in Figure 3 provides some additional evidence for this.Hence, the opinion difference between the control condition andthe ‘‘lazy’’ condition is significantly smaller in the United Statesthan in Denmark (p , .001). Conversely, the difference betweenthe control condition and the ‘‘unlucky’’ condition are signifi-cantly greater in United States than in Denmark (p 5.025). The‘‘lazy’’ welfare recipient seems, in other words, conceptuallycloser to Americans’ typical response, whereas the ‘‘unlucky’’welfare recipient is conceptually closer to Danes’ typical response.Future research could address this more by asking people directlyin such experiments about the degree to which they perceive thepresented welfare recipient as ‘‘typical’’ and whether such ratingsdiffer cross-nationally.


p , .001 and bDenmark 5 .11, p , .001). As evidencedby the relatively steep slope of the solid gray line inFigure 4, Panels A‒B, the more respondents’ stereotypesare dominated by laziness associations, the more theyare opposed to granting social welfare to the targetperson.

Importantly, however, as can also be seen fromthe flat slope of the dotted and dashed black lines inFigure 4, Panels A‒B, when minimal cues are pro-vided about the laziness or misfortune of the targetperson, the effect of stereotypes on opposition tosocial welfare is significantly crowded out among theAmerican and Danish respondents alike. Among theAmerican respondents, the effect of stereotypes isreduced from b5 .08 (p , .001) to b5 .03 (p5 .044)when respondents are presented with clear cues aboutthe laziness of the of the target person and to b 5 .004(p 5 .795) when respondents are presented with clearcues depicting the welfare recipient as unlucky. Thiscorresponds to reductions in the effect of stereotypesof 63% and 96%, respectively, and these reductionsare statistically significant (p 5 .008 and p , .001).

Likewise among the Danish respondents, the effectof stereotypes is reduced from .11 (p , .001) to .05(p , .001) when respondents are presented withcues depicting the welfare recipient as lazy, and to .04(p 5 .002) when they are exposed to cues describinghim as unlucky. These effects correspond to a reduc-tion of the impact of stereotypes of 55% and 64%,respectively, and these reductions are statisticallysignificant (p 5 .003 and p , .001). Thus, acrossthe American and Danish samples, the findings con-sistently support our argument: across national dif-ferences, cues about recipient efforts crowd out theeffect of stereotypes on social welfare opinion.

Conclusion

The welfare state literature has increasingly called forattention to the micro dynamics underlying welfarestate support (e.g., Larsen 2006, 2; Jordan 2010, 863).Importantly, these calls have in many ways been met

FIGURE 4 The Crowding-Out Effect of Minimal Cues on the Impact of Stereotypes


in recent psychologically oriented studies outside thecore literature on welfare states. In this article, wehave for the first time directly integrated the insightsfrom these micro studies into the well-establishedliterature on cross-national levels of welfare statesupport and the transatlantic divide. Whereas theclassical literature on these levels of welfare supporthas been interested in identifying cross-national dif-ferences in welfare support, the psychological literaturesuggests that underneath these differences—at the levelof predispositions—people are basically the sameeverywhere. On this basis, we have argued that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge fromdifferences in default perceptions about recipients’deservingness (i.e., stereotypes) rather than deep dif-ferences in predispositions. By implication, whenindividuals across countries are directly provided withcues that push these perceptions in a particulardirection, people everywhere react in the same wayto these cues and cross-national agreement emerges.

Using an experimental design, we demonstrated(1) that individuals in two highly different welfarestates—the United States and Denmark—have dif-ferent default stereotypes about whether welfarerecipients are lazy or unlucky; (2) that these differ-ences in stereotypes create differences in support forwelfare benefits to a recipient when no clear infor-mation about the recipient is available; (3) that theeffects of these default stereotypes are crowded outwhen direct information is available and, hence,support among Americans and Danes becomes substan-tially and statistically indistinguishable—despite a life-time of exposure to different welfare state cultures.

When generalizing from the current study, itshould be noted that the conclusions are based ona comparison of the United States and Denmark.According to Esping-Andersen (1990), these twocountries are two ‘‘worlds’’ apart when it comes tothe welfare state. Hence, as emphasized in the intro-duction and methods section of the article, thesecountries are commonly viewed as key examples ofthe liberal and universal welfare states, respectively. Atthe same time, there are similarities between Denmarkand the United States. First, as discussed in themethods section, requirements for job search activitiesand labor market activation schemes for unemployedworkers are part of the Danish model. This activeworkfare strategy might reinforce the effect of thelaziness cues in the Danish case (relative to the idealtype universal welfare state), because it implies that thelazy welfare recipient is breaking the (spirit of) Danishlaw. As prior research emphasizes, however, the work-fare strategy has been rearticulated within the Danish

universal welfare state to focus on empowerment asopposed to control and punishment. This constitutesan important difference to the liberal welfare stateregime (Torfing 1999, 6). Nonetheless, it would furtherstrengthen the robustness of the conclusions if theresults could be replicated in a comparison involvingother examples of liberal and universalistic welfare statesas well as comparisons to conservative welfare states(e.g., Germany). Second, while Denmark and theUnited States are different in terms of individualismand collectivism at the level of broader culture (Nelsonand Shavitt 2002), they are not opposite extremeswithin the universe of possible cultural pairings. UnitedStates and Denmark both belong to the cluster ofcountries recently nicknamed WEIRD (Western,Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies)(Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010), and a signif-icant proportion of Americans are even of Scandina-vian descendant. In this way, while there are significantcultural divides between the United States and Den-mark, our results cannot necessarily be generalized toother, even broader cultural divides. At the same time,it is important to note that past studies have validatedthe cross-cultural operations of the deservingnessheuristic and shown that people form attitudes aboutsocial welfare on the basis of deservingness judgmentswell outside the WEIRD societies (see the theory sectionand, in particular, Petersen et al. 2012). This constitutesa prima facie reason to expect broader cultural differ-ences to be reduced—if not entirely obliterated—in theface of deservingness cues. The validity of such expect-ations should be tested in future studies conducted in,for example, Asia or Latin America.

These caveats notwithstanding, we believe thatthe present findings have important implications forour understanding of puzzles in the literature oncross-national differences in welfare state support.Previous research has yielded mixed results, sometimesfinding very large cross-national differences in supportand at other times finding smaller differences (for anoverview, see Larsen 2006). To the extent that cross-national differences in welfare state support emergefrom very stable differences at the level of psycholog-ical predispositions, this inconsistency is puzzling.Given the findings of the present article—that cross-national differences emerge from an interplay betweendifferences in available information and shared psy-chological predispositions—such a pattern of findingsbecomes intelligible. The context sensitivity of welfaresupport implies that cross-national differences willwax and wane. For example, from time to time,external shocks with relevance for public perceptionsof the efforts of welfare recipients will simultaneously


affect several countries and reduce national gaps inwelfare support. One such shock that has receivedattention in the literature is rising unemploymentrates. Studies suggest that the public uses rising unem-ployment rates as a cue that unemployment is nota reflection of laziness but of bad luck and thatthe public consequently grows more supportive ofwelfare under conditions of high unemployment(Blekesaune 2007; Gilens 2000; Kam and Nam 2008).Macro studies have also documented that whenunemployment is high, cross-national macro factorsrelated to government or the welfare state regimematter less for public support for the welfare state(e.g., Jensen 2007). Essentially, under conditions ofunemployment, opinions about the welfare statebecome more uniformly positive, and cross-nationaldistinctions become blurred. Other types of shocksthat simultaneously affect multiple countries andprovide clear cues concerning the efforts of welfarerecipients—such as the onset of war in third-worldcountries and resulting inflows of refugees or theoccurrence of natural disaster (Rao et al. 2011)—couldhave similar effects on cross-national differences andhelp explain some of the mixed findings of pastresearch. More generally, these findings are in linewith recent research that gives greater priority to therole of short-term factors at the expense of structuralfeatures in forming public opinion (e.g., Chong andDruckman 2007; Zaller 1992). In short, politics matters.Because support for welfare benefits critically hinges onthe available information about the beneficiaries, poli-ticians can influence support for specific programs byemphasizing certain information at the expense of otherinformation. Support for welfare benefits and programsbecomes a context-sensitive phenomenon rather thansomething that is immutable given the culture, welfarestate regimes, or sociostructural features of a society.

Because welfare support emerges from the interplaybetween available information and predispositions,macro and micro studies become equally indispensable.Neither knowledge about how different macro con-texts generate differences in available information norknowledge about the predispositions that make indi-viduals seek out and respond to this information canbe discounted. Attempting to privilege the one or theother would be tantamount to attempting to privilegethe role of the oven or the batter in the baking ofthe cake—both factors are necessary and essential(for more on this metaphor, see Richerson and Boyd2004). In this regard, the crucial benefit of a deepunderstanding of the psychological predispositionsthat underlie social welfare attitudes is that it providesclear-cut theoretical guidance in predicting which

specific kinds of informational differences foster differ-ences in support. Why, for example, is it cues relatedin particular to effort, need, gratefulness, group mem-bership, and past contributions—as argued by vanOorschot (2000)—that influence welfare support? Theperspective developed in this article implies that this isbecause all of these kinds of information are relevantto the deservingness heuristic, which forms the rootsof our help-giving psychology. As discussed elsewhere,other types of potentially relevant information, in-cluding the intelligence of welfare recipients, does not,in contrast, matter for welfare support, because thecompetence of others is less relevant for our help-giving psychology than their motivation to reciprocate(for detailed evidence and discussion, see Gilens 2000;Petersen et al. 2012). Ultimately, we foresee that byutilizing insights on the shared psychological disposi-tions underlying the massive variation in opinions andattitudes we observe across nations, we will be able topinpoint the exact institutional, cultural, and struc-tural differences that make a difference. Only in thisway will we gain a full understanding of why and whenwelfare state support differs across nations.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the helpful guidanceand advice received from Christian Albrekt Larsen,Carsten Jensen, Rune Slothuus, Eric Uslaner andMike Wagner.

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Lene Aarøe is an Assistant Professor at Departmentof Political Science and Government, AarhusUniversity, Aarhus, DK-8000, Denmark.

Michael Bang Petersen is a Professor at Departmentof Political Science and Government, AarhusUniversity, Aarhus, DK-8000, Denmark.


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