Abstract
In the last decades, enhancing social trust and improving social quality have been often considered as the antidote to the problems produced by the neoliberal makeover of the social life. However, it remains unclear whether higher social quality and trust actually produce more pro-social attitudes among people. Based on a statistical analysis of a cross-national survey administered in five countries, this article shows that social quality and social trust, as empirical indicators of the social, do not always generate pro-social attitudes. It demonstrates that perceived social quality and trust on social institutions can generate both conservative and liberal attitudes toward social welfare and taxation. In order to explain the varying effects of social quality and trust, we propose a heuristic model of political cognition and motivation, which illustrates how the political variety of the social is possible. Our model highlights the contextual contingencies of the political meaning of the social.
Introduction
This study examines how perceptions of social trust and social quality influence attitudes toward social welfare policy and willingness to pay taxes. It employs a social-psychological approach to explain the patterns of such popular attitudes and provides a framework that describes the mechanism of attitude formation.
Attitudes toward welfare policy and taxation have been extensively studied in previous literature (Blekesaune and Quadagno, 2003; Bonoli, 2000; Brooks and Manza, 2007; Cook and Barrett, 1992; Edlund, 1999, 2006; Jæger, 2006; Svallfors, 1997, 1999, 2004). Studies have tried to show the cross-national differences of such attitudes and find their individual-level and macro-level determinants.
In search of explanatory variables, past studies have generally theorized and identified two major factors for these effects, which are self-interest and normative beliefs. Theories based on self-interest provide a rationalist explanation of individuals’ welfare attitudes and policy opinions (Iversen and Soskice, 2001; Meltzer and Richard, 1981; Rehm, 2007). On the other hand, studies that focus on revealing the influence of cultural, ideological, and normative beliefs show that popular attitudes on welfare and redistribution are contingent on each society’s institutionalized ideational orientations and moral order (Clarke, 2004; Mau, 2004; Staerklé et al., 2012). Such political-cultural orientations are often embedded within formal institutional arrangements, processually evolving with changing structural conditions. Comparative studies that examined the attitudinal differences across different ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ and other studies that adopted a comparative-institutional framework had to take, at least partially, normative mechanisms into their accounts (Andreß and Heien, 2001).
While these rationalist and culturalist theories have their own explanatory values, each approach has its own theoretical pitfalls. The rationalist, interest-based explanation does not fully reveal under what contexts individuals’ self-interest and calculations are activated or muted. That is, as Staerklé et al. (2012) suggests, the theory itself fails to address that the causal effect of self-interest on attitudes is moderated by or even a part of cultural environments. It also loses explanatory power when the impact of self-interest is overridden by other psychological motivations.
The problem of the cultural and normative explanations is a little more complex. The theoretical presumption that society’s culture, values, and norms are stored and internalized in people’s minds and provide motivational sources to generate stable social actions has received heavy criticism in cultural sociology and sociological theory (Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Silver, 2011; Swidler, 1986, 2001; Vaisey, 2009). According to the critiques, such a Parsonsonian/Weberian model of social action is, to a large extent, unrealistic. Some of the main points of these critiques are: (1) the causal power of cultural norms is overrated; rather than an ‘unmoved mover’ of social actions, culture and norms are rationales, tool kits, and repertoires that people strategically use to make sense of their thoughts and actions and fit them to practical purposes, and (2) contra what the classical ‘internalization’ or ‘socialization’ accounts would suggest, individuals do not hold a highly coherent and structured value system. Their stable social actions are more strongly guided by a set of useful social heuristics and practical skills they learn over time from their concrete experiences and situations.
There are two common points underlying these critiques that are particularly relevant for this article: first, the typical normative (or ‘representational’) approach does not get the mechanism correct and precise enough. Second, culture has a limited causal role in shaping individuals’ thoughts and actions. These arguments suggest that we need to be careful when applying a normative perspective to explaining attitudes toward welfare and redistribution. A simple model that draws a picture of cultural norms suffusing into people’s value systems and shaping attitudes may be too simple to be a successful model.
As these problems of the classical view of culture started to emerge, sociologists found that helpful insights could be borrowed from cognitive psychology, as accumulated findings in the cognitive sciences could confirm or discredit some of the critical ideas in sociological theory (DiMaggio, 1997). Due to this elective affinity between cultural sociology and cognitive psychology, the socio-cognitive approach has been taken more seriously in examining cultural phenomena (Cerulo, 2010; Gross, 2009; Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Lizardo et al., 2016; Ostertag, 2010; Strandell, 2015; Vaisey, 2009). Building on this background, this article suggests a heuristic model based on a cognitive-motivational approach to provide an analytic framework that explains the driving forces of popular attitudes. It contends that attitudes toward welfare policy and taxation are formed through cognitive-motivational phases where individuals’ social-cognitive heuristics guide their motivational orientations, which can lead to opposing attitudinal outcomes (i.e., conservative or liberal attitudes). This will allow us to overcome some of the limitations of the typical theoretical approaches in the literature from the past by specifying a more concrete mechanism of how attitudes are formed. 1
Aside from this theoretical contribution, what is the substantive importance of this subject? From what aspect do we need to care about how preferences for welfare/tax attitudes and social trust/quality are associated? In this article, we basically regard perceptions of social trust and social quality as concrete manifestations of ‘the social.’ The problem of the social has been one of the fundamental concerns for sociologists in recent decades in many forms (Bellah et al., 1985; Hall and Lamont, 2009; Putnam, 1995; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010), all explicitly or implicitly wrestling with the idea of the ‘good society.’ In this line of thought, society as a larger whole is philosophized as something fundamentally missing in individualistic culture and the dominant economic doctrines of efficiency and profitability. Protecting the impulse of the social, through enhancing social trust and the quality of society, is regarded as an opposing force against the impoverished philosophy of marketization and garnered increased attention and justification as Polanyi’s pendulum swung back toward social protection (Kalleberg, 2009).
In this context, higher social trust and positive perceptions of social quality in society are regarded important because they are assumed to be positively correlated with stronger other-regarding, altruistic attitudes, such as more egalitarian opinions about welfare policy and taxation. This article shows that positive perceptions of social trust and social quality are not always generative of pro-social attitudes about redistributive policies. History shows that various ideas that emphasize ‘society’ have been associated not only with liberal political thoughts but also very strong conservative ideas. The social-cognitive approach can explain this malleability of the political value of the social better than most rationalist or norm-based theories. This article will show how the political valence of social trust and social quality is not predetermined, but subject to agents’ heuristic understanding and its motivational effects on their attitudes.
In the empirical analysis, we examine the ways in which people’s perceptions of their society are connected to conservative or liberal political attitudes. With data from social surveys conducted in five countries (i.e., Germany, Greece, Italy, South Korea, and Turkey), we analyze and compare the patterns of associations between (a) people’s perceptions of their society and (b) their political opinions regarding social welfare and taxes.
The cognitive-motivational mechanism of attitude formation
Political heuristics of cognitive agents
The collective body of studies on welfare and tax attitudes shows a very complicated and inconsistent picture, which makes explaining the determinants of attitudes and their cross-national variations considerably challenging. Relying on cultural explanations to solve the problem may face the endogeneity problem: the problem of making empty and self-evident explanations (Svallfors, 2012: 227). Furthermore, the typical cultural or norm-based explanation can exacerbate the problem because such concepts are not very useful for decomposing the endogenous mechanism of attitude formation. A cultural norm as a concept is essentially about the sense or visceral feelings of oughtness, and any theoretical explanation that relies on such a concept would leave a large part of the mechanism as a ‘black box.’ The concept of ‘culture’ lacks analytic preciseness as an investigative tool to untangle the complex intermediary processes of attitude formation.
Another problem is that cultural explanation tends to bring an assumption that ignores ‘the agentic action in exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment that counts,’ which is seriously considered in cognitive approaches (Bandura, 2001: 4). Therefore, accounts based on cultural beliefs, values, and norms have the risk of generating largely misleading lay intuitions about how attitudes are formed and the role of culture in that process. Actors are not just exposed to cultural environments; they learn from these environments.
The cognitive aspect is particularly important regarding perceptions of redistribution because actors structure their attitudes not just based on outcomes but also based on process and contexts. For example, Konow (1996, 2000) shows that people’s conception of fairness, sense of entitlements, and the degree of other-regarding attitudes are fundamentally determined by the procedures that led to the outcome. The relevant variables individuals can influence in the allocation process shape their general attitudes (Bergh, 2008).
Therefore, for agents of experiences, their cognitive appraisal and cognitive evaluation of the process and contexts of redistribution are undeniably important parts of their attitude formation (Schachter, 1964). Rather than placing cultural or norm-based accounts at the center of the explanatory mechanism, we take a more cognitive approach to specifying the processes of the mechanism.
In relatively recent scholarship, there have been significant attempts in the political trust literature to introduce a novel mechanism by taking the cognitive process into account more seriously. One such attempt is the trust-as-heuristic perspective (Hetherington, 2005; Rudolph, 2009). This perspective suggests that when the public is uncertain about the effect or meaning of a proposed social policy, they tend to use their political trust toward the political leader or policy makers as a heuristic device to determine their attitudes toward the policy. In this case, individuals with high political trust are willing to make material sacrifices (e.g., support for tax increase) or ideological sacrifices (e.g., liberals supporting tax cut) as long as they perceive the government or political leader as trustworthy.
The fact that this heuristic process is operating behind our critical thinking is not big news. Numerous cognitive psychological works on social cognition have repeatedly found that most of our cognitive processes rely on heuristics: heuristic reasoning, affect heuristic, and heuristic cognitive mapping pervade our social cognition, namely how we perceive, understand, evaluate, and remember other people, our social interactions, and social situations (see Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier [2011] for review). This article argues that the politically contingent nature of the social as a political symbol is an object of heuristic political cognition. This means that the political meaning of social trust and quality depends on how agents’ social heuristics are processed into political interpretations. The results of the analysis will show that there is a distinct tendency in each society for how different heuristics produce different redistributive attitudes.
This argument is consistent with the early cognitive sociological views of Fleck (1979 [1935]) and Zerubavel (1997) that how individuals think and reason is dependent upon their thought communities. While that thought-community perspective can be traced back to Durkheim’s ideas (Douglas, 1986), our view deviates from the conventional Durkheimian emphasis on the status of the social as the sacred. That is, in a typical Durkheimian framework, possessing positive feelings about one’s community is likely to result in pro-social, pro-welfare attitudes.
Our study rejects that idea. While one’s perceptions and evaluation of society can be an important reference point for one’s opinion about social welfare, the direction of that referential relationship is not determined; that reference only functions as a heuristic channel. Having positive views about the conditions of one’s society can produce attitudes that are more individualistic and less social welfare-oriented. Belief in the ‘good society’ can be based on or even lead to the belief in individual autonomy, viewing the society as an aggregate of responsible and self-helping individuals. 2
On the other hand, we claim that the heuristic inference that channels social cognition to political cognition is largely an unconscious process, as with a number of other kinds of heuristics. In this research, we will describe this process with the general characteristics of most heuristic processes: an efficient judgmental shortcut that focuses on selected and limited information to reach a conclusion under uncertainty and time limits. To finally form an opinion about social welfare policy or paying more or fewer taxes, however, cognitive processing itself is not enough; it has to meet a certain affective component in the mental process to produce attitudes about inequality or making monetary sacrifice for others. Here we regard that the affective component is driven by the psychological motives of individuals and propose that there are largely two kinds of motives that determine the relationship between social cognition and political cognition.
Analytic framework: The cognitive-motivational mechanism
What are the possible mechanisms that connect (a) perceptions of social quality or the level of social trust with (b) attitudes toward social welfare and taxes? We consider three possible pathways that link the two. The first kind of mechanism is ideological sorting (Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008). That is, there are society-specific ways of how different ideas and attitudes of different domains are packaged together, so individuals possess more or less coherent ideological orientations across social, economic, political, and moral domains. In this study, however, we control for the self-identified political positions of individuals in analysis, so we will not focus on that mechanism.
Instead, we highlight two other possible cognitive-motivational mechanisms, which are related to human motivation that has been extensively studied in social psychology. Motivation is not separable from social cognition, as social cognitive processes have motivational effects on individuals (Schunk and Usher, 2012: 17). Studies in political psychology have also found that different social attitudes are based on different motivational bases, which strongly suggests that specifying motivational dynamics is crucial for understanding the nature of attitudes (Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt and Sibley, 2009; Jost et al., 2003, 2009).
The two motivational pathways we consider as attitude generating mechanisms are as follows. The first one is the pro-social motive, such as altruism, empathy, and collectivism (Batson et al., 2008; Charness and Rabin, 2002; Fehr and Schmidt, 2006; Piliavin and Charng, 1990). If one has a positive perception of the general condition of one’s community (i.e., a high level of perceived social quality) or has a high level of social trust, then such a psychological condition will generate pro-social motives, which subsequently lead to egalitarian attitudes regarding paying taxes and social welfare. This mechanism describes the general image of how individuals live in a ‘good society,’ where other-regarding individuals trust and help one another, making a safe, trusting, warm, and reliable community based on strong social capital.
However, another kind of causal mechanism can be unfolded by a totally different human motive, which is a system-justification motivation (Jost and Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2004). Positive evaluations of one’s society, in terms of social quality or trustworthiness, can enhance one’s belief in the fairness of one’s social institutions, which brings about the ideological legitimation of the status quo and weaker pro-social motives. Past studies in social psychology have shown that the human motivation to legitimize the current system (i.e., the system-justification motive) tends to weaken pro-social and egalitarian attitudes. Once this kind of motivated reasoning is prominently activated, positive perceptions or evaluations concerning social quality and social trust will result in less supportive attitudes about social welfare and taxes. The whole process is based on justifying the status quo and also justifying the outcome; the system is good, so there is no need to help. While such thinking may be derived from conscious reasoning, it is also deeply rooted in our motivational basis (need) to believe that our world is generally a fair and just place, which ‘Just-World Theory’ (Lerner, 1980; Lerner and Lerner, 1981) has found as a prevalent psychological tendency with significant individual-level variation. The just-world theory claims that people have an inherent motive to believe that others get what they deserve. And the theory suggests that such a ‘belief in a just world’ is a justice motive that shapes the visceral reaction of individuals to what happens to themselves and other people. We believe that one’s social cognition based on perceptions of social quality and social trust can consistently affect this type of justice motive, leading to system justification.
Figure 1 summarizes our discussion and shows the contingent nature of the effects of perceptions of social quality and social trust on attitudes about welfare and taxes. The reason for this contingent nature is that the quality of social conditions and the strength of social trust do not have the same affective valence for individuals in different political-cognitive communities. This variety of meaning of the social prompts different sets of political motivations, and these different motives will provide the emotional engine and affect-charged basis for canalizing social cognition into political attitudes.
The analytic framework.
Social quality and social trust
This article utilizes the subjective perceptions people have about their society as the empirical indicators of the concept of the social. Needless to say, the social is a fundamentally obscure and contested concept. While its ontological status can be a matter of social-philosophical debate, we regard it as the ‘configurations of interacting people as social beings,’ which are based on ‘historically determined conditions before these interactions take place’ (Beck et al., 2001: 312). Therefore, we focus on two major aspects of the social: (1) the socio-historical conditions of social interactions and (2) the strength of the affective anchor of such interactions. For each aspect, we look to the concepts of social quality and social trust, respectively, to approach the problem with empirical indicators.
Social quality
Social quality as a quantitative indicator was developed ‘as a standard by which to measure the extent to which the quality of the daily lives of citizens has attained an acceptable European level’ (Beck et al., 1997: 2). As a conceptual construct, Beck et al. (2001) define the idea of social quality as a heuristic device that can reveal ‘the extent to which people are able to participate in the social and economic life of their communities under conditions which enhance their well-being and individual potential’ (p. 340).
Past discussions on social quality have generally revolved around four major issues and features of society that characterize the ‘quality’ of social conditions: socioe-conomic security, social cohesion, social inclusion, and social empowerment. More detailed introduction and specifications of social-philosophical and conceptual bases of that typology are provided in Beck et al. (2001), Gasper et al. (2008), Walker and van der Maesen (2012), and Yee and Chang (2011).
In the present article, we use four survey variables that are important constituent elements in each social quality component. Specifically, they are individuals’ perceptions of: (1) risk in society (socio-economic security), (2) the level of social trust (social cohesion), (3) the level of social embracement (social inclusion), and (4) society’s capacity to empower individuals (social empowerment).
Previous literature on social quality has been more closely centered on theoretical investigations and has not directly examined whether popular perceptions of social quality have an influence on redistributive preferences. The empirical analysis of this study will fill that important gap in the literature.
Social trust
As Simmel said, ‘Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate’ (Simmel, 1978 [1907]: 178). Trust is the essential element of the social, particularly because the existential basis of trust can be found in relationships. In this study, we focus on two kinds of social trust: generalized trust and institutional trust. This approach roughly corresponds to Luhmann’s (1979) distinction between interpersonal trust and system trust.
Generalized trust, differentiated from particularized trust which is concerned with specific trust toward one’s family, friends, neighbors, and familiar others, concerns individuals’ unspecific attitudes toward different abstract, unknown others in society outside of their close, immediate social circle. Numerous past studies have found that generalized trust has positive effects on a wide variety of social conditions concerning social capital, democracy, crime, cooperation, civic culture, voluntary associations, pro-social behaviors, and equality. The collective findings of all these studies render the image of generalized trust a ‘civic lubricant of thriving societies’ (Delhey et al., 2011). Because generalized trust is treated as the most important attitudinal aspect of social capital (Rothstein and Stolle, 2008), we employ a measurement of this as an empirical indicator of the social and posit that it has a significant effect on the attitudes individuals have concerning welfare and taxes.
On the other hand, we also consider institutional trust as another social trust variable. The level of people’s trust toward the state, governmental, public, or major social institutions reflects the culture of trust that permeates in a society and shows to what extent the society trusts and has confidence in itself. Institutional trust is also often considered one of the most important sources of generalized trust (Stolle, 2003). However, institutional trust has a somewhat different texture from generalized trust, particularly because of the importance of feelings of fairness in institutional trust. Trust is often more than just warm feelings toward others and is based on one’s or society’s collective belief in the reliability and reasonableness of generalized exchange systems (Levi-Strauss, 1969 [1949]; Martin, 2009). Therefore, contrary to generalized trust understood as ‘belief in the benevolence of human nature in general’ (Yamagishi and Yamagishi, 1994: 139), institutional trust is the idea that those who violate the generalized exchange system of society are expected to be sanctioned or punished in a principled way, as people demand stability, security, and fairness to reduce uncertainty (Levi-Strauss, 1969 [1949]; Martin, 2009). If we bring this idea to the context of social welfare and paying taxes, we can expect that the rational side of institutional trust may be found relatively strong.
Past studies on the effect of social trust on welfare and tax attitudes show a mixed picture. Svallfors (1999) found no significant relationship between political trust (system trust) and attitudes toward redistribution in Sweden and Norway. Edlund (1999) also found that political trust (confidence in government) does not have a strong relationship with attitudes to redistribution in the USA and Norway. However, these findings do not mean that political trust has no meaningful influence on redistributive preferences or welfare state support. For example, Bergh and Bjørnskov (2011) show that countries that have historically high levels of trust have larger welfare states. Edlund (2006), based on his review of previous studies, suggest that different levels of political trust do not produce different general attitudes toward welfare state but instead affect opinions about concrete welfare institutions and specific policies such as taxation and welfare financing forms (Edlund, 2006: 396). His empirical analysis also shows that distrust in the institutional capacity of the welfare state sometimes leads to preferences for larger welfare state intervention for some citizens, while for other citizens distrust is linked to anti-welfare state sentiments. Overall, these studies show that the causal link between trust and welfare attitudes needs to be carefully and concretely examined. This study aims to provide new empirical evidence to deconstruct the link and discuss the mechanism.
Aside from attitudes toward welfare policies, another major dependent variable in our analysis is individuals’ willingness to pay more taxes for the poor and other people. There have been a number of studies regarding how social trust and norms affect people’s attitudes and behaviors about taxation, such as tax compliance, tax evasion, and tax morale (Feld and Frey, 2002, 2007; Wenzel, 2004, 2005). However, few studies have examined how social trust and quality affect individuals’ willingness to pay more taxes for other people, which strongly reflects their pro-social, altruistic motivation.
Data and methods
In this article we use data from The Life and Society Survey, conducted in 2008 and directed by the Institute for Social Development and Policy Research (ISDPR) at Seoul National University in South Korea. The ISDPR carried out a multi-year research agenda that focused on the idea of social quality and its determinants and consequences for a cross-national comparative research project, for which a host of quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analyzed as part of the research project on social quality. The Life and Society Survey was conducted in four European countries (Germany, Greece, Italy, and Turkey) and one Asian country (South Korea), surveying 5232 individuals in total.
Dependent variables
Our empirical analysis focused on four dependent variables, which can be grouped into two categories: (a) opinions about social welfare policy and (b) opinions about personal willingness to pay more taxes.
For (a), we asked two sets of questions, for each of which survey respondents had to choose between two statements. The first question asked respondents to choose between, ‘Welfare should be reduced for economic growth’ and ‘Welfare should be extended even if it means economic stagnation.’ We call this item ‘growth-versus-welfare.’ The second question also offers a binary choice: ‘Welfare should be provided only for the poor’ and ‘Welfare should be provided for all people regardless of income levels.’ We call this survey item ‘selective-versus-universal.’ Logistic regression models were used to examine the determinants of these variables.
For (b), we also asked two questions, both of which were on a 10-point scale. The first one asked, ‘If the taxes you pay were to be used for the welfare of the poor, would you be willing to pay more taxes for this or not?’ The second question asked, ‘If the taxes you pay were to be used for general welfare regardless of income levels, would you be willing to pay more taxes for this or not?’ (1 = Not at all to 10 = Strongly willing to). OLS regression models were used for analysis.
These two kinds of opinions deal with relatively different areas of social welfare attitudes. The first set of questions asks individuals’ opinions about the desirable policy direction of their country, whereas the second set of questions deals with their own personal willingness or moral-economic judgment regarding tax problems. Employing these different kinds of questions related to the problem of welfare and redistribution will allow us to expand the scope of welfare attitudes research. On the other hand, different patterns revealed from the analysis using each set of questions will show us how perceptions of social trust and quality are linked to (1) general policy opinions (e.g., macroeconomic tradeoffs) and (2) willingness to make a material sacrifice for others in different ways.
Independent variables
Main independent variables
We focused on three key independent variables to test the impact of the social: social quality, generalized trust, and institutional trust.
First, a (perceived) social quality construct is built by extracting the common factor among the four variables that measured the opinions of individuals about their society: (1) safe society or risky society, (2) trusting society or distrusting society, (3) embracing society or discriminating society, and (4) empowering society or lethargic society. The social quality factor shows generally good reliability as a latent construct, whose Cronbach’s alphas of each country were: .68 (Germany), .89 (Korea), .85 (Italy), .91 (Greece), and .93 (Turkey).
Next, generalized trust and institutional trust variables are included in the analysis. For generalized trust, we employ the widely-used method of measurement that asks, ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?’, and the responses were coded 0 (I need to be very careful) or 1 (Most people can be trusted). Institutional trust was measured from a factor analytic construct by asking the levels of trust people had toward the following organizations or institutions: the central government, the national assembly, the judiciary, the local government, the army, political parties, labor unions, NGOs, and the press (Cronbach’s alpha: .89).
Control variables
In order to control for various demographic factors and contextual effects, a host of control variables were included in the model. First, conventional demographic controls such as age, gender, marital status, levels of education, and household income were included. We used log-transformed household income variables due to the highly skewed distribution of the raw household income data. Other than these, we also included the subjective class positions of individuals, their opinions about the transparency of the administration of the welfare budget, and their political views. The subjective class position variable was measured on 10-point scale, where individuals located themselves from the bottom (1) to top (10) groups in society. Although it is not a typical demographic control in existing literature, we decided to include this variable since the subjective class identification of individuals can be as much an important determinant as their actual earnings, especially when it comes to their willingness to pay more taxes for other citizens.
The perception people have about the transparency of the administration of the welfare budget was also included in the model. This variable was based on the five-point scale survey item, ‘How transparent do you think public officers are in their administration of the welfare budget?’ Because transparency can be an important influencer of people’s attitudes toward social welfare policies and taxes and also social quality and trust, we controlled for its effect in order to focus on the net effect of social quality and social trust.
The political view variable measures the self-reported political-ideological orientations of individuals on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (conservative) to 5 (liberal). The inclusion of this variable was intended to control for the possible effect of ideological positions as a confounding variable, which simultaneously affects both independent variables (i.e., social quality/trust) and dependent variables (i.e., welfare/tax attitudes). Because the political beliefs of individuals can operate as a background determinant of various kinds of social, political, and economic attitudes, the inclusion of this variable was necessary. Alternatively, the party-identification (or supporting party) of individuals can also be used. We ran models with the political party variable in separate analyses, but the results were substantively the same, and we decided not to use the variable because of the large number of missing values, and because including the variable would be basically adding a dozen dummy variables that unnecessarily discount the degrees of freedom of the regression model.
Results and discussion
Figure 2 shows the mean values of four social quality components in Germany, Korea, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. The figure clearly exhibits that Germany shows noticeably higher levels of perceived social quality across all four items, particularly with regard to security and social inclusion. On the other hand, Greece shows the lowest levels of perceived social quality in all the components. Such a gap is perhaps due to some chronic differences in each country’s socio-cultural conditions, but the temporal contexts of the economic recession in Europe in 2008 likely have influenced the social-psychological integration differently in each country. Our empirical results will show that Germany’s relatively high levels of perceived social quality may have significant implications for explaining how the heuristic value of the social is determined.
Mean values of social quality components by country.
In order to include social quality indices in regression analysis, we ran an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using the four social quality components and produced factor scores. Figure 3 shows the factor loadings for perceived social quality in the five countries. The factor loadings show the regression coefficients of each social quality item (i.e., security, cohesion, inclusion, and empowerment) used to construct the social quality factor score; namely, to what extent each item contributes to the social quality scale.
Factor loadings for perceived social quality by country.
Figure 3 shows that perceived social cohesiveness is generally the most significant item in constructing the social quality score. It carries the highest factor loading in all the countries except for Germany. On the other hand, security turns out to exhibit a strikingly low factor loading (.27) in Germany, whereas it generally has a moderate to high level of loading in the other countries. This implies that for Germans, the issue of social safety is a relatively distinct issue from the other issues. How to interpret this and what it implies will be discussed with reference to the results of regression analyses.
Figure 4 shows the statistical results of general trust and institutional trust for each country. The mean values of two kinds of social trust are displayed. The figure clearly shows that German respondents have relatively high levels of general trust and institutional trust. Together with the previous figure, the data show that Germany has higher levels of perceived social quality, general trust, and institutional trust, compared to Turkey, Korea, Greece, and Italy. What would such attitudinal differences tell us about the opinions of people about social welfare policies and paying taxes? Would a high level of social capital generate more egalitarian attitudes? Or is the effect contingent on heuristic interpretations, as suggested by Figure 1? In the following analyses, we investigate how perceived social capital and policy/tax attitudes are associated in different ways in different countries. That association reveals that the political meaning of the social has varying weights and meanings across different societies.
Levels of general and institutional trust by country.
Table 1 shows the results of a logistic regression of the ‘growth-versus-welfare’ variable. Among our ‘social’ variables (i.e., social quality, generalized trust, and institutional trust), a higher level of perceived social quality is associated with stronger pro-growth attitudes in Germany and South Korea. Generalized trust and institutional trust are significantly associated with pro-welfare attitudes in Germany and Korea, respectively. The social variables did not have a highly significant effect on the attitudes about growth-versus-welfare in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Considering that economically better-off individuals, in terms of household income, tend to prefer growth over welfare according to these results, the fact that a higher level of perceived social quality is associated with pro-growth attitudes in some countries suggests that perceiving one’s society as positive leads to conservative welfare attitudes. It is possible that one’s political beliefs or motivations operate as a confounding variable to create such a positive association. For example, political conservatives have motives to justify the status quo (i.e., higher perceived social quality). In order to control for that possibility, we included the political views of individuals as a control variable. In other analyses not reported here, we also added a variable of the political party affiliations of people to control for the effect of their political orientations, and the overall results were substantively the same as presented in Table 1.
Logistic regression of preference for growth (0) or welfare (1).
Standard errors in parentheses.
p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, +p < .1.
This result stands in odd contrast to the common notion that strong social capital builds the basic blocks of social solidarity and can potentially reduce social inequality (e.g., Portes and Vickstrom, 2011). When it comes to the problem of growth-versus-welfare, higher perceived social quality is associated with conservative economic policies, at least in certain societies. On the other hand, both stronger general trust and institutional trust are associated with pro-welfare attitudes in Germany and Korea, suggesting that a people’s level of trust increases their support for social welfare, even at the expense of economic growth. This difference suggests that a people’s actual feelings of trustworthiness of other people or social institutions and their perceptions of social quality, although both of them reflect the idea of social capital, have different political effects. This issue will be further explored later on.
Finally, the results show that higher household income is conducive to preferring growth over welfare. The political view variable did not have a significant explanatory power to predict growth-versus-welfare attitudes.
Table 2 shows the result of a logistic regression analysis of the support of individuals for selective (0) or universal (1) social welfare. While the previous table showed some mixed findings, more complicated patterns start to emerge from this analysis. First, perceived social quality turns out to have almost a non-significant effect in all five countries. On the other hand, social trust shows complex results. In Italy, the higher the generalized trust, the more one is likely to support selective social welfare programs. However, in Turkey, the higher the generalized trust, the more one is likely to endorse universal social welfare programs. These results suggest that such varying effects of social trust on welfare attitudes are actually rooted in different ideological contexts and political interpretations of selective or universal welfare problems. That is, the effects of the political view variable show that, in Italy, liberals tend to support universal social welfare, whereas in Turkey, liberals support selective social welfare. So the political effect of social trust, as the most important aspect of social capital, is embedded in such varying ideological landscapes. The process of attitude formation is driven by the political heuristics that operate within society-specific contexts. Overall, how the problem of ‘selective-versus-universal’ welfare is heuristically interpreted in different societies shows a remarkably complicated pattern. A clearer picture is revealed in following analyses.
Logistic regression of support for selective (0) or universal (1) welfare.
Standard errors in parentheses.
p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, +p < .1.
The next tables (Table 3 and 4) show the results of using different kinds of dependent variables, which surveyed one’s personal willingness to make an economic sacrifice for the good of other people by paying more taxes. The results presented in Table 3 are based on the dependent variable of whether one is willing to pay more taxes for the poor.
Ordinary least square regression of willingness to pay more taxes for the benefit of the poor.
Standard errors in parentheses.
p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, +p < .1.
Ordinary least square regression of willingness to pay more taxes for the benefit of people in general.
Standard errors in parentheses.
p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, +p < .1.
The most interesting pattern is that perceived social quality is positively associated with willingness to pay more taxes for the poor in four countries, the exception being Germany. Thus, in Korea, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, those whose perceptions of their society are more positively rendered tend to show more altruistic attitudes regarding helping the poor by sacrificing themselves. This pattern shows a sharp contrast with the results presented in Tables 1 and 2, where the perceived social quality generally did not show statistically significant effects on one’s welfare attitudes and even increased the preference for growth over welfare (in Germany and Korea). This means that in four of the countries, if one possesses a positive evaluation on one’s society in terms of inclusiveness, cohesion, empowerment, and safety, that perception can boost one’s empathy and altruistic motivation. Among the four countries, the Korean case particularly draws our attention. In Korea, those who view their society positively may show conservative economic opinions regarding social welfare policy (Table 1), but they are actually more willing to accept higher taxes for poor citizens than those who have a lower perception of their social quality (Table 3). This pattern is both interesting and important because it shows the nuance of the political implication of perceived social quality as an indicator of social capital and also the discrepancy between the policy opinions of individuals and their personal behavioral decisions. Simply speaking, it shows that a higher perception of social quality can boost pro-growth and pro-welfare attitudes (in different domains) at the same time.
Other than in Germany, generalized trust turned out to have a non-significant effect on the willingness to pay more taxes. In Germany, individuals with stronger generalized trust were more willing to pay more taxes for the poor. This is an interesting pattern when compared to the results in Table 1, which show that Germans with stronger generalized trust are more likely to support growth over welfare. Taken together, these results show that generalized trust as a form of social capital reinforces the preference for growth-oriented policies, but at the same time, increases the willingness of citizens to help the poor by making economic sacrifices. This mix of conservative and liberal orientations in the effect of generalized trust shows that the effect of ‘the social’ is clearly contingent on a society’s political and cultural platform and how it shapes the interpretive frame of citizens, which can sometimes make the taxation (policy) attitudes of individuals differ from their actual willingness to pay taxes.
In the case of institutional trust, the pattern is more complicated but also interesting. In Korea and Greece, a higher level of institutional trust led to a stronger willingness to pay taxes to benefit the poor, whereas in Germany and Turkey, the effect of institutional trust was the opposite. Such a negative effect was particularly significant in Germany. This means that in Germany and Turkey, stronger confidence in governmental and public organizations makes an individual less likely to agree to pay more taxes for the benefit of the poor. Our analytic framework (Figure 1) suggests that such an opposing pattern is due to activation of different kinds of political-cognitive motivations. In Korea and Greece, where institutional trust increases the willingness to pay more taxes for the benefit of the poor, trust enhances pro-social motives to strengthen altruism and empathy. In contrast, in Germany and Turkey, institutional trust is more prone to activate the motivation of system justification, which decreases pro-social behaviors. This stark difference shows that trust does not always mean other-regardingness or benevolence toward others. The political value of trust is embedded in socio-political contexts. The fact that the political landscape shapes the basis of one’s heuristic decision-making is also revealed by the political view variable. The results show that in Germany, political liberals tend to agree more with paying more taxes, while in Italy, it is the political conservatives who are more supportive of the idea.
Table 4 shows the results of a regression analysis using one’s willingness to pay more taxes, not only for the benefit of the poor, but for the welfare of society in general. This survey item is related to the previous dependent variable on support for selective-versus-universal social welfare (Table 2), but it touches on a different attitudinal aspect by asking about the personal willingness of respondents to help others in their society, generally. As in Table 3, the social quality variable shows a positive and statistically significant effect on the dependent variable in Korea, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. That is, higher perceived social quality generates more altruistic attitudes. Surprisingly, it has a statistically significant negative effect in Germany. In contrast to the other countries, in Germany a positive evaluation of society in terms of social quality depresses one’s altruistic motives regarding taxation. Together with the result in Table 1, which shows that the higher perceived social quality leads to the preference for growth over welfare in Germany, this table strongly suggests that the higher perceived social quality tends to enhance economically conservative attitudes in the country.
A similar pattern is found for institutionalized trust, which shows that higher institutional trust decreases one’s willingness to pay more taxes for others only in Germany. In Korea and Greece, institutional trust increases the willingness to pay more taxes, showing institutional trust can also bring about pro-social attitudes.
As for generalized trust, the statistically significant effects are all positive in Korea, Greece, and Turkey, indicating that stronger generalized trust produces pro-social attitudes regarding paying taxes for the benefit of others.
As in Table 3, the political view variable in Table 4 also shows the contextual contingencies owing to distinct political heuristics in each country. Liberals tend to show more willingness to pay taxes in Germany, but the opposite pattern is found for Italy.
When all the results from Tables 1 to 4 are considered together, another point deserves our attention. A higher economic position in society, measured by (household) income or subjective class, often led one to prefer growth over welfare. But when it comes to a willingness to more generously pay taxes for the benefit of the poor or the welfare of society in general, people with higher subjective class positions are more likely to show a stronger willingness. Here we can observe that individual policy preferences, largely shaped by class-based ideological orientations, and tax attitudes as a personal moral choice do not necessarily exhibit formal consistency. People with high incomes are more comfortable making a material sacrifice (i.e., to personally pay more taxes) while keeping their conservative ideological stances (i.e., to support growth over welfare for social policies) at the same time.
This means that when it comes to personal moral decision-making (e.g., whether to share one’s economic resources with other people or not), different kinds of motives are activated. Using Deutsch’s (1975) famous typology of fairness, equity, and need as the three basic categories of distributive justice principles, we can discern the different justice motives. For the economically better-off individuals, the idea of paying more taxes is related to the principle of need, which generates pro-social, altruistic attitudes. But when the problem is about economic policy rather than paying taxes, such an egalitarian motive is relatively muted and different psychological motivations (e.g., fairness) or justification logic (e.g., Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘market’) are triggered. Thus, which motives become activated can be drastically different by the framing of the problem.
The varying political value of social capital across societies also produces such motivational contingency. The significant negative regression coefficients of the social quality and institutional trust variables (Table 4) suggest that in Germany, the perception of the social is often closely tied to the justice motive of fairness; it is a moral perception that our society provides decent opportunities for most citizens and is equipped with trustworthy institutions, so there is no need to personally help other people using one’s own money. This perception is driven by the system-justification motivation introduced in Figure 1. In some other countries, the idea of paying more taxes for the benefit of the poor or society in general is more closely connected to the justice motive of need. This is related to the pro-social and collectivist motives.
Why does a difference among countries exist? Why are different kinds of political motives strongly activated in some societies and not in others? Our data here cannot provide direct evidence to resolve these questions. However, the patterns revealed in the data and from the differences of Germany’s social welfare system from the other four countries provide some possible answers. Our data (Figures 2, 3, and 4) show that the levels of perceived social quality and generalized and institutional trust in Germany are markedly higher than those in other countries. Also, a large number of past studies on European welfare models show that the Continental model (Germany) institutionalized more generous welfare programs than the Mediterranean model (Greece and Italy) or the models in Turkey and Korea, which have much less developed welfare programs. These factors, namely a higher perceived social quality and more generous welfare systems, provide a contextual platform that people heuristically use to form their attitudes on social policies and taxes. More specifically, in a country like Germany where the average perceived social quality is high and the social welfare system is relatively more generous, citizens who have an even higher perception of social quality and institutional trust would view that individual citizens should take responsibility for themselves, since the system is already well-designed and functioning justifiably. But in other countries like Greece, Italy, Korea, and Turkey, a different heuristic pathway is shaped, whereby individuals with higher perceptions of social quality and institutional trust show enhanced pro-social and egalitarian opinions. These results collectively provide evidence that perceptions about a society provide the heuristic basis for constructing socio-economic attitudes.
Summary and conclusion
Since the demise of the capitalist golden era in the mid-20th century, two major solutions have been proposed to restore the glorious past and solve the social problems of today: participatory democracy and community; participatory democracy, in order to cure the ills of capitalist domination through politics, and community, to find fundamental solutions to the ills of modernity through strong reciprocal bonds. These two share a common underlying goal, which is to recover the social by brining individuals together as an organic whole. The writings of sociologists and commentators have largely assumed that the collective will let us overcome most impending social problems in the modern world.
This article provides empirical analysis that challenges such a perspective by revealing the complexity and nuances of the political effects of the social. History shows that the ideological meaning of ‘society’ has always depended on the cultural syntax of one’s time and society. This study shows that trust and perceived social quality do not have a predetermined impact on the minds of citizens. The point that merits our particular attention is the association between social capital and conservative welfare/tax attitudes. In some societies, a higher level of (institutional) trust and positive perception of social quality is negatively associated with willingness to pay taxes or preference for growth. In such societies, if the perceived social quality and institutional trust are high, then people become less willing to pay more taxes for the benefit of other people. That is, people think they have to help other people if they view that the system is not working well. If they have faith in the justifiability of their society and social institutions, they are less inclined to think they must help others. This kind of reasoning is also reflected in the opinions individuals have about the perennial policy problem of growth-or-welfare. A positive evaluation of social quality enhances preferences for growth over welfare (as in Germany and Korea), whereas in other societies, a level of perceived social quality and institutional trust is positively associated with a level of pro-social attitudes.
In order to account for these varying effects of perceived social quality and social trust, we proposed a heuristic model based on motivational contingency, which illustrates how the political variety of the social is possible. The motivation of individuals is embedded in their social contexts, where people base their political cognition on a motivated understanding of their social world.
Of course, this study is not without limitations. Some of our conclusions, particularly regarding why Germany shows different patterns from the other countries, are not based on direct evidence. More country-specific examinations are required to fully unfold the complex contextual factors that shape each country’s patterns. Also, the temporal conditions of the year 2008 may have influenced the results of our analysis. It is possible that the situation in 2008, when a severe economic crisis hit Europe, caused Germans who had beliefs in their social system and institutions to be more cautious about expanding social welfare. Also, the large amount of immigration into Germany at this time may have triggered defensive attitudes in the German respondents, out of motivation to secure the quality of existing German social institutions and suppress the increasing welfare demands from a changing society. Similar analysis from different times will provide interesting comparative outcomes. On the other hand, with regard to the three measures employed as indicators of the social, there are other possible directions for future studies. For example, as for the trust variables, many studies have pointed out possible examples of room for improvement of the dichotomous scale, such as by changing it to a multipoint-scale variable or changing the wordings of the conventional question (see Lundmark et al. [2015] for discussion). More empirical studies employing the social quality scale and examining its determinants and outcomes need to be accumulated in order to place this study’s results in relation to other empirical studies. We can develop survey modules and scales that can better represent the idea of social quality. Lastly, the cognitive-motivational explanations this article proposed as the attitude-forming mechanism cannot be directly tested with our data; they can be confirmed only with experimental data.
Overall, this article offers a new agenda for future studies regarding the contextual contingencies of the political meaning of the social. It demonstrates that in order to know how social conditions work to influence political attitudes, we have to understand that various kinds of social-psychological mechanisms can simultaneously function and which psychological motives are particularly salient in that process. This research also shows that restoring the social is not the end of the political contest between individuals and society, but can be another beginning of the complex dialectic of competing ideologies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the Institute for Social Development and Policy Research at Seoul National University and Dukjin Chang at Seoul National University for generously sharing The Life and Society Survey data.
Funding
This research was supported by the University of Seoul Junior Faculty Research Grant 201504291138.