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The Absence of Cleavage in American Attitudes Toward Social Welfare

William M. Epstein
School of Social Work
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
4505 Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas NV 89154-5032
(702) 895-4348
wepstein@ccmail.nevada.edu

With few and isolated exceptions, the enduring, perhaps characteristic, American attitudes toward social issues of poverty and public assistance are largely similar for all income and ethnic groups. The American ethos is fundamentally conservative with strong preferences for characterological as opposed to structural explanations of social outcomes. American socio-economic stratification is popular in spite of great and growing inequality. Indeed, American attitudes toward welfare and related issues appear to be so deeply shared across time and probably by most Americans that they constitute the heart of the nation's civil religion and a structural barrier to progressive social welfare reform

Method
This research analyzes 65 years of American opinion polls, filling an important gap in the published research by describing the degree of the American consensus on social welfare, that is, the degree of attitude cleavage by class, ethnicity, race, and gender. Cleavage is described by crosstabulations; statistical significance is tested by appropriate procedures (ANOVA, Chi Square, etc.). Data is drawn from more than seventy surveys since 1972 and more than thirty surveys between 1935 and 1972, comprising more than one hundred thousand individual responses over the years.

Findings
A startling consensus exists among almost all income groups belying any hope for the politics of class.

These opinions begin to explain the popularity of the 1996 welfare reforms, their expansion into the faith-based initiatives of the new federal administration, and more generally the American failure to address economic insufficiency through public policy.