The paradox between the substantial public provision of social benefits to U.S. citizens and their low levels of regard for and trust in government has long been a subject of interest to students of American politics. Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril (1968) noted one explanation: the tendency of Americans to be ideologically conservative and operationally liberal on matters of social policy. Thomas Frank popularized the paradox in his 2004 study of the rise of populist conservatism, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Scholars have investigated many dimensions of this puzzle, including policy feedback: whether and how the design and reach of social policies shape public attitudes toward government and political behavior.
Suzanne Mettler has been a major contributor to this literature. Her books on the GI Bill (2005) and The Submerged State (2011) are classics. Her latest offering is destined to join that corpus of classics. The Government-Citizen Disconnect takes aim at the growing gulf between people’s declining positive perceptions of government and the increasing role it plays in their lives. Her goal is to better grasp how the experiences of individuals with the welfare state relate to their participation as citizens in the political process.
Mettler is very resourceful in undertaking this research. The key element of her study design is an original telephone survey of a national sample of adults (with oversamples of young individuals and low-income households) designed to examine Americans’ usage of and experiences with 21 social policies. This survey provides the first comprehensive accounting of individuals’ lifetime use of social policies and the opportunity to link these experiences with their political participation. The policies examined include both direct government payments and services and social benefits administered through the tax code, distinguishing between all four combinations of means-tested versus non-means-tested and visible versus submerged designs.
Fully aware of the limitations of a single cross-sectional survey for capturing the lifetime usage of social policies and inferring causal connections with political attitudes and behavior, Mettler marshals additional evidence to buttress her findings. She collected data from multiple government agencies to determine the percentage of Americans covered by each of these federal social policies and the real value of those benefits over time. These data allow her to assess the changing size and shape of the U.S. welfare state. She also makes use of data available through the Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis to illustrate change in the percentage of personal income that flows from the federal government across time and space. State and county-level maps prove very helpful in providing the context and interpreting the results of her multivariate analysis of the survey data. Finally, she makes constructive use of a small number of open-ended interviews with survey respondents and several case studies.
The book is chock-full of interesting descriptive findings. Here are a few examples: “If we consider only public social spending or government transfers, the U.S. welfare state is smaller as a percentage of GDP than that of other affluent nations, ranking twenty-fourth worldwide, but if we account also for the social expenditures channeled through the tax code and tax-subsidized payments from employers, the United States has the second-largest welfare state in the world after France” (p. 4). “But U.S social policies, on net, do less to mitigate inequality and reduce poverty than those elsewhere—in part because the American welfare state redistributes substantial benefits upwards to those with higher incomes, particularly through the policies in the tax code” (p. 48). Virtually all Americans have received benefits from at least one of the many federal programs that are part of the social safety net. “The average adult has utilized 4.47 of these policies, and the pervasiveness of usage spans differences in income, age, race and ethnicity, and partisanship” (p. 4). “The share of personal income that flows from the federal government has increased all over the nation, in ‘red states’ on the electoral map even more than in ‘blue states,’ and with peak levels in counties with overwhelmingly white populations (surpassing 95 percent)” (p. 4)
The heart of Mettler’s analysis is detecting how individual experience with different types of social safety net programs shapes evaluations of government. The answer is not very much. Although Americans generally appreciate policies they have used and give them fairly high marks, this does not translate into favorable assessments of government. Policy design makes some difference: those with accumulated usage of visible policies are grateful for the assistance. That is not so for those benefiting from submerged policies. And citizens who make the connection and have more positive views of government are the least likely to have their voices heard in U.S. politics.
Two other factors overwhelm the impact of personal experiences with policies on perceptions of government. First, “for those who harbor highly negative views of welfare, typically middle-income people and whites, it serves as a microcosm of government generally, informing their view of it and fueling their hostility to it” (p. 116). Second, shared group identities and experiences, most importantly partisanship, influence orientations to government. “Each of these dynamics overpowers policy feedback effects, leaving Americans oblivious to the role government plays in their lives” (p. 116).
Mettler concludes with a set of very thoughtful reflections on how the rise of a political economy hostile to government undercut the authority and legitimacy that government had held for an earlier generation of Americans. She convincingly ties her findings about the disconnect between the government and its citizens with regard to the social safety net to developments in the party system—the deep ideological, demographic, and geographic polarization; radicalization of the Republican Party; and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. As an instinctive patriot, unifier, and optimist, Mettler ends her book with a brief section on “The Way Forward.” It provides no magic to dispel the gloom that settles on the reader on reaching that point, but rather a reminder of what we aspire to be: “we are a political community, one built on respect for the ideas that all are created equal and that ‘we the people’ can govern ourselves. We can advance by honoring our reciprocal obligation to each other through the bonds of citizenship. By reaffirming that quest, we can carry on together, as citizens of a democracy” (p. 155).
