Deserving Americans: Partisanship and the New Politics of Social Policy University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2027
Why do Americans support some government programs but not others? In Deserving Americans, Chris Faricy and Christopher Ellis argue that the answer lies not in ideology but in identity. Drawing on evolutionary psychology and original survey data, they show that judgments about who deserves government assistance shape the boundaries of the social welfare state — and that in today’s polarized politics, those judgments run almost entirely along partisan lines. Democrats and Republicans don’t just disagree about the size of government; they disagree about who is morally worthy of its assistance. Democrats extend a wide net of deservingness across a diverse range of groups; Republicans apply a narrower gate, privileging self-reliance and a more restricted circle of worthy recipients. Deserving Americans offers a powerful new framework for understanding why facts often fail to persuade, why group loyalty eclipses individual interests, and why political divisions feel so visceral and personal.
The Other Side of the Coin The Russell Sage Foundation, 2021
Despite high levels of inequality and wage stagnation over several decades, the U.S. has done relatively little to address these problems — at least in part due to public opinion, which remains highly influential in determining the size and scope of social welfare programs. In The Other Side of the Coin, Christopher Ellis and Chris Faricy examine public opinion towards social tax expenditures, the other side of the American social welfare state, and their potential to expand support for social investment. Drawing on nationally representative surveys and survey experiments, Ellis and Faricy show that social welfare policies designed as tax expenditures are widely popular with the general public. Contrary to previous research suggesting that recipients of these subsidies are often unaware of indirect government aid – Ellis and Faricy find that citizens are well aware of them and act in their economic self-interest in supporting tax breaks for social welfare purposes. Importantly, tax expenditures are more likely to appeal to citizens with anti-government attitudes, low levels of trust in government, or racial prejudices. The authors find that many people view the beneficiaries of social tax expenditures to be more deserving of government aid than recipients of direct public social programs, indicating that how government benefits are delivered affects people’s views of recipients’ worthiness.
Reviews
Journal of Social Policy, Volume 51, Issue 2, April 2022, pp. 463–465.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279422000095
“Tax breaks are the largest component of the U.S. welfare state, more costly than Social Security and Medicare combined. Christopher Ellis and Christopher Faricy’s pathbreaking analysis illuminates the broad political appeal of these programs in a country wary of ‘big government’ and obsessed with ‘deservingness.’ It also highlights the social cost—in economic inequality and unrelieved poverty—of America’s peculiar reliance on a submerged welfare state.”
—Larry M. Bartels, May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science, Vanderbilt University
Welfare for the Wealthy Cambridge University Press, 2015
How does political party control determine changes to social policy, and by extension, influence inequality in America? Conventional theories show that Democratic control of the federal government produces more social expenditures and less inequality. Welfare for the Wealthy re-examines this relationship by evaluating how political party power results in changes to both public social spending and subsidies for private welfare — and how a trade-off between the two, in turn, affects income inequality. Christopher Faricy finds that both Democrats and Republicans have increased social spending over the last forty-two years. And while both political parties increase federal social spending, Democrats and Republicans differ in how they spend federal money, which socioeconomic groups benefit, and the resulting consequences for income inequality.
Reviews
Jacob S. Hacker, “America’s Welfare Parastate,” Perspectives on Politics, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2016, pp. 777–783. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592716002760
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 15, Issue 4, December 2017, pp. 1163–1165 — https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717002833
New York Times Books Review http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/books/review/all-things-being-unequal.html?_r=0
Washington Post Interview https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/02/12/how-the-united-states-built-a-welfare-state-for-the-wealthy/