As the pandemic accelerated calls to provide relief to millions of student borrowers, President Biden announced executive action to cancel $10,000 of student debt for most federal student loan holders. Both prior to and following his announcement, policymakers have debated the merits and details of student debt relief, focusing particular attention on the perceived deservingness of student loan borrowers. But we have little systematic evidence about how the public evaluates borrower deservingness, or whether elite arguments framing support or opposition to debt relief in terms of deservingness influence public preferences for student debt cancellation. We employ original conjoint and framing experiments conducted just prior to Biden’s announcement to explore each query. We find that, while certain borrower characteristics indicating need (e.g., amount of debt), responsibility for debt (e.g., type of institution attended), and reciprocity (e.g., time in repayment) can influence people’s evaluations of whether borrowers deserve debt relief, those results may not translate to broader deservingness arguments for or against student debt cancellation in a clear manner. Ultimately, our results shed light on a timely policy issue, while extending scholarly understandings of deservingness for a critical and understudied aspect of the American welfare state. 

Deservingness and the Politics of Student Debt Relief

Emotions are gaining increasing attention in public policy. Policy process research so far has focused on the effects of emotions rather than their roots. In social psychology, emotions are a central part of social identity theory (SIT), and the relevance of social identities in the policy process (SIPP) has recently been acknowledged. This raises the question of how the identification with social groups is linked to emotions related to policies and policy preferences. Filling this research gap, this article analyses social identities and resulting emotions as potential explanations for public policy preferences. The findings reveal that the strength of social identities is a significant predictor for policy-related emotions. However, it also shows that the explanatory power of social identities and related emotions differs by policy field. Our results have implications for the study of social groups and emotions and for understanding and overcoming conflicts between people with different identities and emotions.

Social identities, emotions and policy preferences

Policies regarding people with disabilities (PWDs) are formulated without PWDs perceptive and often rule out disability identity owned by PWDs. Those policies potentially result in further issues regarding PWDs empowerment. This research aims to investigate about factors that shape disability identity and how disability identity could provide a new perspective in policy formulation. Researchers interviewed seven PWDs with different disability conditions to gain their perspective on their perception of disability identity. Furthermore, data were analyzed to form three factors of disability identity, which are structural factors, personal and social interaction factors, also organizational development factors. This research also explains how disability identity could be implemented in public policy formulation through some aspects that could be considered further in policy regarding of disability and PWDs.

https://ijds.ub.ac.id/index.php/ijds/article/download/436/294

Disability Identity

Bureaucratic biases in trust of expert policy advice: a randomized controlled experiment based on Chinese think tank reports

This paper examines how the resources associated with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Unemployment Insurance program affect political participation. The research on policy feedback on mass publics has produce greater results relative to research on feedback and political participation. However, prior research has not disaggregated resource feedback effects thoroughly enough to decipher whether the monetary resources provided by a social welfare program are independent of the effects of the duration of receipt nor have they disaggregated the effects by race to estimate the racialized feedback effects. This is crucial because the primary questions surrounding the development of social welfare programs are: who should get it, how much they should get, and how long they should get it for. Research has also found that social welfare programs can produce disparate resource feedback effects, both encouraging and discouraging participatory behavior. To answer these questions, I utilize the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I incorporate three comprehensive measures of social welfare receipt which allow the estimation of the effects over time. I find that the amount of aid received, and the duration of receipt are both significant factors in shaping participatory behavior but depending on the program I find heterogeneous effects. The disparate effects persist across social welfare programs and race. 

Racialized feedback and social welfare receipt: disentangling duration and dollar amount mechanisms on policy feedback effects

Extant literature highlights how socially constructed target populations shape the distribution of benefits and burdens, focusing on political elites. In this article, we examined how linked fate, intersectionality and identity complexity shape the impacts of socially constructed target populations on public support for affirmative action in the US. In our nationally representative survey experiment, we randomly assigned respondents to evaluate either a socioeconomic or race-based affirmative action policy and tested the influence of linked fate and partisanship on policy support. First, we found support for our linked fate hypothesis – low-income and non-White respondents were more likely to support socioeconomic or race-based affirmative action, respectively. We also found that the intersectionality of identities – sex, income and race – predicted support for race-based and socioeconomic-based affirmative action. Second, we found that partisanship moderated the effect of linked fate. When interacted with Republican Party identification, the effect of linked fate on support for affirmative action among low-income and racially minoritised respondents disappeared. These findings demonstrate the importance of integrating social identity theory and intersectionality in policy design theory. In this way the article makes a clear contribution to the scholarship on policy design studies.

Integrating identity in policy design theory

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Integrating identity in policy design theory