The paradoxical effect of welfare knowledge: Unveiling income cleavage over attitudes to welfare in South Korea
- Authors
- Lim, Sijeong; Tanaka, Seiki
- Issue Date
- 2022
- Publisher
- SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
- Keywords
- Welfare state politics; support for social spending; income cleavage; knowledge; South Korea
- Citation
- INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW, v.43, no.1, pp.67 - 84
- Indexed
- SSCI
SCOPUS
- Journal Title
- INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
- Volume
- 43
- Number
- 1
- Start Page
- 67
- End Page
- 84
- URI
- https://scholar.korea.ac.kr/handle/2021.sw.korea/137607
- DOI
- 10.1177/0192512120906009
- ISSN
- 0192-5121
- Abstract
- The extent of the rich-poor divide in attitudes to welfare varies across societies. Existing studies focus on the progressivity of the welfare system and macroeconomic conditions to explain cross-society variation. We shed light on another factor that we believe is key to understanding the variation: the public's knowledge of the welfare state. We suggest that the prevalent ignorance of how welfare state institutions work dilutes the rich-poor divide over social spending, especially in emerging welfare states. We empirically illustrate our point using original survey data from South Korea, a country where previous studies repeatedly found little or no effect of economic class on welfare state attitudes. We reveal a strong income-based cleavage over social spending in a subset of the Korean population with more accurate knowledge of the welfare system. Our findings carry important implications for understanding and projecting welfare state politics in a broader set of emerging welfare states.
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