The link between self-interest and support for social protection policies has over the past decades been at the core within the field of welfare state studies. Recent analysis of attitudes during the Great Recession has provided new evidence that the unexpected loss of one’s job causes an increase in support for welfare policies. Much less is known about how an increase in unemployment risk caused by the crisis affected attitudes among the much larger unharmed part of the population. The unharmed population is particularly important as they potentially had a greater cumulative effect on changes in aggregate attitudes. By leveraging the significant and exogenously-induced changes in municipal unemployment caused by the Great Recession, this study provides more rigorous evidence than typically available to show that in the case of Sweden the unemployment shock did induce an aggregate increase in support for raising unemployment insurance benefits. Another important contribution is the evaluation of the socioeconomic stratification of support over time, whereby attitudes among those less and more at risk of unemployment are tracked to determine if one or more groups are driving the change in aggregate support. The results demonstrate that the strongest driver behind changes in aggregate attitudes are individuals belonging to lower income households.

Considerable research has been devoted to evaluating the relationship between economic conditions and opposition toward labor immigrants or immigrants in general (unforced migrants). Yet, very little research has evaluated how economic conditions affect attitudes toward refugees (forced migrants). In line with the well-established approach to explaining inter-group competition and threat, group conflict theory argues that opposition toward all migrants (out-group) should increase during periods of economic decline. At the same time, a related strand of research shows that in general the public perceives forced migrants more positively and deserving of help than unforced migrants, often referred to as the deservingness heuristic mechanism. This suggests that forced migrants might be spared the opposition that group conflict theory predicts. To test this, I use survey data collected by the National SOM survey and European Social Survey before and after the onset of the Great Recession to evaluate how changes in unemployment affected attitudes toward both forced and unforced migrant policies in Sweden. My results demonstrate opposition toward unforced migrants increased in areas hardest hit by unemployment, in-line with the prediction of group conflict theory. However, in contrast no changes in attitudes are observed toward forced migrants. This indicates that the deservingness heuristic may be relevant to explaining the formation of attitudes toward forced migrants that group conflict theory does not account for. In addition, by leveraging the particularly rapid and large changes in unemployment caused by an externally originating crisis it allows me to make a stronger claim for causal evidence.

The conventional approach to explaining support or opposition for taxes, as well as other redistributive policies, has involved the motive of self-interest. Yet, evidence emerging in the fields of behavioral economics and political psychology have demonstrated that under certain conditions non-selfish motives are measurable and do influence attitude formation and behavior. In the case of attitudes toward redistribution, several recent studies have repeatedly shown that when individuals are exposed to informational cues which characterize a recipient of welfare as 1) in clear material need and 2) that their circumstances are not a consequence of a lack of effort but instead caused by bad luck – they will judge them as more deserving of state aid, even if providing aid runs against their own self-interest or ideological values. The limitation is that these findings rely on experimental evidence and therefore may not translate well to the disorder inherent to real-world conditions. In this study, I explore if deservingness cues were activated on a widespread scale as a result of the economic harm caused by the Great Recession, specifically the spike in unemployment. If so the expectation is that those typically supportive of cutting taxes (motivated either by material self-interest or ideological reasons) would temporarily suspend their support because they understand that taxes are vital to funding welfare benefits to those harmed by the crisis. The results reveal that those with the least support and greatest scope to change their attitudes, the ideological right, became less supportive of reducing taxes in municipalities with higher unemployment hikes compared to those residing in municipalities with lower hikes. This effect remains statistically significant when controlling for a proxy for self-interest and can be interpreted as evidence supporting the relevance of the deservingness heuristic in explaining tax attitudes.