A new study, soon to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that policy makers can bridge partisan polarization and increase support for social welfare programs by crafting messages that are compatible with voters’ beliefs about how financial well-being changes over time.

The paper, titled “Lay Beliefs about Changes in Financial Well-being Predict Political and Policy Message Preferences,” is co-authored by Job M. T. Krijnen of the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets; Associate Professor of Marketing Gülden Ülkümen of the USC Marshall School of Business; and Professor of Management Craig R. Fox, and his doctoral student Jonathan E. Bogard, of UCLA Anderson School of Management.

“Disagreements about redistribution policies arise because people differ in their beliefs about why an individual’s financial well-being changes over time,” said Ülkümen.

Beliefs about financial well-being vary along three independent dimensions that the researchers label rewarding, rigged, and random:

• Rewarding reflects the belief that financial rewards accrue from individuals’ effort or talent.
   
• Rigged reflects the belief that financial rewards accrue from factors outside individuals’ control such as favoritism or discrimination.
   
• Random reflects the belief that financial rewards are inherently unpredictable and result from chance events.

“Those who hold rewarding beliefs favor policies couched as incentives for good behavior,” said Fox, describing the differences in peoples’ attitudes toward social welfare policies. “Those who believe that rewards are rigged favor the same policies couched as remedies for past inequity. Those who believe that rewards are random favor policies couched as social insurance.”

These findings explain an important factor underlying both political polarization and policy disagreements: people’s beliefs about the drivers of change in financial well-being. Despite the commonly held wisdom that support for welfare policies is overwhelmingly tied to political ideology, the authors show that belief-compatible messages can increase support for redistribution policies and politicians who espouse them, across the political spectrum. 

The authors assess the three belief categories across four experiments with 3,662 U.S. citizens, using a new scale they developed, a nine-item measure that they label the Causal Attributions of Financial Uncertainty (CAFU) scale.

One important finding is that political conservatives strongly believe that changes in financial well-being are driven by rewarding factors. In contrast, liberals strongly believe that changes in financial well-being are driven by rigged or random factors.

“This finding holds even after controlling for demographics and psychometrics,” said Krijnen.

In another study the authors find that people are more likely to vote for a candidate who speaks about social policies in ways that are consistent with voter’s beliefs. 

“People’s disagreement about welfare policy stems from a failure to properly define the policy in terms that resonate with multiple world views about financial well-being,” said Bogard. “A small reframing of the policy to be consistent with diverse beliefs can go a long way toward solving major disagreements.”