Inequalities

Tag: political attitudes

  • The elephant in the room of social security reform

    Lots of smart people on the left are thinking about how to create a better social security system – but I’m worried. Most seem to agree that there’s a lot wrong with Universal Credit (UC). The five-week wait, the benefits cap, the two-child limit, the Work Capability Assessment, the generally low levels of payments – […]

  • Perceptions of poverty levels: a long view

    This is a guest post by Elizabeth Clery (@liz_clery), who works with the amazing NatCen team that are responsible for the British Social Attitudes Survey. The latest British Social Attitudes report came out in July, and it pointed out a puzzle in public attitudes to poverty: Trends in poverty have remained relatively stable over the […]

  • Attitudes to redistribution: does it matter where you live?

    This is a guest post by Nick Bailey on some of the first work on the geography of attitudes to redistribution, based on his just-published paper (with four colleagues). More on this from me (Ben) over the summer too, it’s a really interesting area to investigate!  As several previous posts on this list have noted (including this […]

  • The surprising truth about benefits stigma in Britain

    This article was originally posted on the LSE Politics & Policy blog – it’s a co-written post by me, Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney, based on our new report on the stigma of claiming benefits that  came out last week. If you don’t pay much attention to these issues – hell, even if you do – you probably think […]

  • The positive and negative consequences of the welfare state

    In a previous post, I argued that people had exaggerated the extent to which public support for the benefits system had fallen in Britain. Here, I want to look at another aspect of this that also came out recently – how far we think the benefits system causes negative consequences for the economy and society. […]

  • The misreported death of solidarity in Britain

    It’s rare for journalists to be waiting for social research with baited breath, pens poised and column inches left blank in anticipation. But the annual release of the ‘British Social Attitudes’ series does just that, a testament to just how interested we are in what we think about one another (and to cheap journalism…). The […]

  • Romney’s Tirade against the Bottom Half Does Not Represent American Values

    I was going to blog about some new education research, but that can wait. I feel compelled, instead, to write about Mitt Romney’s closed-door comments about government dependency, which were leaked by Mother Jones yesterday. Here’s what Romney told a group of donors: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the […]

  • Why is the Romney Campaign Lying about Welfare?

    Mudslinging and downright distortion are now an integral part of the presidential race, but one recent advertisement from the Romney campaign stands out. The ad slams Obama for allegedly changing the work requirements that were set under the 1996 welfare reform law. The tagline of the ad is, “under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to […]

  • Immigration and the politicisation of everyday experience

    Where do hostile attitudes towards immigrants come from? ‘The media and politicians’ often comes the cry from those on the left, seeing the hostility as something brewed by outside forces for their own ends.  ‘People’s own experiences’ is often the response from the right, arguing that people feel worried both culturally and economically from interacting […]

  • Where do we go from here?

    In this final report on the Attitudes to Wealth and Economic Inequality in the UK event run by Cumberland Lodge, Charlotte Cavaille asks ‘where do we go from here on attitudes to redistribution?’  From the two previous posts, the following picture emerges: the UK has become a high inequality country (relative to where it was in the immediate post-war period) with […]