Research Overview

Is there a general support for the welfare state attitude? One we can observe across countries and time? In a study of public opinion during the 1990s in five countries (Breznau 2010), I find some confirmatory evidence for a latent attitude that encompasses support for government provision of health, old-age, family and educational support including both price regulation and subsidies. 

Using different data from many more countries spanning the over three decades, I again find confirmatory evidence for a similar underlying attitude toward government provision of social welfare, or what scholars often label 'the welfare state' (Breznau 2019)

I also look at how existing levels of inequality, presumably as a result of varying social policies, shape public preferences for redistribution. The basic theory is that more inequality should push the public to shift toward preferences for more government redistribution. However, in looking at within-country associations both raw and adjusting for other variables, I see no generalizable effect in my join work with Carola Hommerich (Breznau and Hommerich 2019).

Motivated by a basic theory of governance that public preferences shape policy outcomes, I have been researching the hypothetical impact of opinion on policy since my Master's studies. Findings by Brooks and Manza (2006) particularly motivated me, because they reported a partial correlation coefficient that was positive and NHST significant for opinion from the International Social Survey Program predicting Social Spending. 

As part of my matriculation a supervisor suggested that I computationally replicate their results. I was unable to do so, and in the process I discovered they made a model misspecification (Breznau 2015). They forgot to include the main effect in an interaction between welfare regime type and public opinion. My work on this study was a key moment compelling me into the open science movement. 

My 'multiverse' assessment is below in Figure 3 (from the paper) that I used to conclude that Brooks & Manza's model misspecification led to a statistical anomaly.

In my replication, I used a multiverse analysis method (although this method did not have a name at the time) to demonstrate that they made a misspecification. David Weakleim (2016) published a comment to my Brooks & Manza replication, suggesting an alternate model, where legal institutions rather than welfare state regime is the better variable. When he ran a model this way, he came back to a statistically significant NHST that the partial correlation coefficient suggesting a positive effect of opinion on policy. This an a publication by Bernhard Kittel (2006) showing totally different results in welfare state research under similar-but-different model specifications particularly sparked my interest in meta-science. 

I continue to work on the relationship of public opinion and social policy. Building on the thermostatic model concept by Soroka and Wlezien (2010), I theorize that public opinion and social policy have a simultaneous feedback association. From our observational perspective, they are constantly feeding back into each other, so as to create the appearance of simultaneous causality. This led to a budding theory and development of a test model shown below (Breznau 2016, 2018).