This project investigates the effect of personal experience upon core American values. Many scholars concur that core values provide a stable foundation for people's attitudes on public policy. The argument is that such values as individualism and equality are formed early in life and are relatively resistant to change. The question remains whether people's values might change when their personal experiences and knowledge of others' experiences challenge beliefs at the heart of those values.
The intellectual merit of this project is rooted in its examination of the effect of chronic unemployment upon people's attitudes toward the value of hard work, which lies at the heart of economic individualism. The context for the project is the fact that so many US citizens are affected by the current economic conditions, especially that of long-term unemployment. This project, informed by extant scholarly work, posits that the personal circumstance of unemployment, combined with information about others' problems and the severity of the economic downturn, should affect people's beliefs about the extent to which they have control of their economic well-being and their own sense of satisfaction, which in turn should reduce their support for one core value of American politics, individualism--that is, the belief that people should get ahead on their own hard work.
This study builds on the investigator's prior work in order to assess the effect of unemployment, as well as the general economic downturn, on changes in people's individualist attitudes. This project will re-interview, for two additional waves, respondents from the investigator's September 2010 survey of the general population, with an oversample of unemployed respondents. That first study collected information about respondents' attitudes toward individualism and equality, as well as measures of their employment status, length of unemployment, their information about others' unemployment, and their attitudes about their recent financial situation and future prospects. By re-interviewing these respondents, this project will allow for an examination of any change in respondents' values, the nature of those changes, and the extent to which personal experiences are related to those changes as the nation's economy improves and people return to work.
This study makes several broader contributions. It will create a publicly available dataset of special interest to scholars studying the impact of significant personal experiences such as unemployment upon political attitudes. The study will also have policy implications for determining, for example, whether extending unemployment benefits, which can ameliorate unemployment's negative consequences, has an effect upon public support for social welfare policies. Perhaps most broadly, the project enhances understanding of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. The lessons it offers hold interest for scholars, policymakers, and citizens alike.
This study used a public opinion survey that interviewed individuals on three occasions from the early fall of 2010 until the late winter of 2012 in order to track their employment experiences and general financial situation during the recovery from the Great Recession. The study included an augmented sample of individuals who were unemployed to compare their experiences and attitudes with another sample of employed individuals in order to study how their attitudes changed with both their changing personal situation as well as the changing national economic situation. The findings from this study indicate that the experience of being unemployed, the length of one's unemployment, and the employment status of one's family and friends during the Great Recession of 2008 weakened people's beliefs in the idea that hard work is rewarded with economic success. Moreover, these experiences were related to increased support for government policies, such as jobs projects and the stimulus, that were proposed to ease the effects of the recession. The research shows that adult experiences can lead to changes in political values that are generally believed to be developed during and remain fairly stable from childhood. The study also indicates that these values can be influenced not only by the conscious linkage that people make between their experiences and self-interest, but also through emotional feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that arise from the situation of being unemployed or having to rely upon others for economic support. These findings indicate that people's political attitudes and values do not result solely from a cold consideration of one's circumstances and self-interest, but can be overwhlemed by their emotional responses to their circumstances. Additional analysis demonstrates that people's emotional reaction to uncertain economic conditions can also influence their attitudes on unrelated political matters, specifically the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. Regardless of their experiences with unemployment, the persons responding to the survey in this study who felt higher levels of anxiety about economic conditions were more likely to favor an accelerated withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. This research suggests how a nation's economic circumtances can influence the public's appetite for military involvement overseas, which could, in turn, constrain political leaders' choices in conducting foreign policy. The broader impact of the findings from this study is an improved understanding of the pressures that policymakers face from the public during economic downturns. Simply put, poor economic conditions can influence the political beliefs on both related and unrelated areas of public policy members of the public with some first- or second-hand experience with long-term unemployment that differs in from the relatively shorter-term experience of unemployment that arises in most economic recessions. Poltiical leaders, therefore, need to consider how attitudes toward public policy can change in more enduring ways during such dramatic economic downturns.
