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Does Receiving Government Assistance Shape Political Attitudes? Evidence from Agricultural Producers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2022

SARAH F. ANZIA Open the ORCID record for SARAH F. ANZIA [Opens in a new window] ,
JAKE ALTON JARES Open the ORCID record for JAKE ALTON JARES [Opens in a new window]  and
NEIL MALHOTRA Open the ORCID record for NEIL MALHOTRA [Opens in a new window]
SARAH F. ANZIA*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, United States
JAKE ALTON JARES*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, United States
NEIL MALHOTRA*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, United States
*
Sarah F. Anzia, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, United States, [email protected].
Jake Alton Jares, Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, United States, [email protected].
Neil Malhotra, Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, United States, [email protected].
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Abstract

When individuals receive benefits from government programs, does it affect their attitudes toward those programs or toward government generally? A growing literature blends policy feedback theory and political behavior research to explore these questions, but so far it has focused almost exclusively on social policies such as the Affordable Care Act. In this article, we focus on a very different set of government programs that reach a more conservative, rural population: agricultural assistance. Our study ties administrative records on participation in USDA farm aid programs to an original, first-of-its-kind survey measuring agricultural producers’ political attitudes. We find that receiving agricultural assistance is sometimes related to producers’ views of the program delivering the benefits, but it depends on the divisiveness of the program and—for highly partisan programs—recipients’ ideology. However, receiving federal agricultural assistance is not associated with more positive views of government.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 1389 - 1406
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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References

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