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Unveiling the technological future that citizens want and their concerns in a changing world

Abstract
Voters support less spending on means-tested entitlements when they perceive beneficiaries as lacking motivation to work and pay taxes. Yet do concerns about the motivations of "undeserving" beneficiaries also extend to universal public goods (UPGs) that are free and available to all citizens? Lower spending on UPGs poses a particular trade-off: it lessens subsidization of "unmotivated" beneficiaries, but at the expense of reducing the ideal levels of UPGs that voters personally can access. Studies suggest that individuals will sacrifice their preferred amounts of public goods when beneficiaries who do not pay taxes try to access these goods, but it is unclear whether they distinguish based on motivations. To analyze this question, we field a nationally representative survey experiment in the UK that randomly activates some respondents to think about users of the country's universal National Health Service as either "motivated" or "unmotivated" noncontributors. Although effect sizes were modest and spending preferences remained high across the board, results show that respondents support less spending on the NHS when activated to think of users as "unmotivated" noncontributors. These findings suggest how the deservingness heuristic may shape public attitudes toward government spending, regardless of whether benefits are targeted or universal.

AbstractForeign students are one of the most significant immigrant categories in many North American and Western European countries. Yet, as their numbers have swelled, many governments have experienced increasing pressures to cap their entry. This is true despite the sizable benefits that foreign students bring to host countries, and despite standard political economy concerns about immigrants—that they take away jobs or abuse public entitlements—not applying to foreign students. We field a nationally-representative survey experiment in the UK, one of the top destinations for foreign students, to examine potential activators of public support for capping the number of foreign students. Results show that support for caps is most activated when citizens are primed to think about foreign students competing with domestic students for scarce admissions slots at universities.

We are witnessing the start of a deep and prolonged political convulsion. This convulsion is caused by the impact of technological change on how wealth is generated and distributed in our societies. Since the 1970s advanced economies have seen a strong productivity increase and stagnant labor income. We believe this should be described as a major breach of our social contract. It is leading to the stagnation of income of the Middle Class, growing inequality and, ultimately, a radicalization of our politics. Unless the cause of this is properly diagnosed and the underlying drivers addressed head on we are bound to see a worsening of the convulsion. Here the paper analyzes technological change, its key cause and propose a series of bold experiments that countries should undertake in order to develop a new social contract with its citizens. The risk of doing nothing involves a long period of uncertainty and convulsion as well as the likelihood that little is achieved in tackling the underlying problems.

AbstractFederalism theorists debate the desirability of funding local services from local revenues or inter-governmental grants. Tiebout expects efficiency gains from local funding, but Oates says it perpetuates inequalities. Research using data from national probability samples has yet to show whether efficiency-equity trade-offs are associated with funding sources. We describe the trade-off in education by estimating the effect of revenue share from local sources on math and reading achievement. Data come from national probability samples of student performances on tests administered between 1990 and 2017. Relationships are estimated with OLS descriptive models, event study models of school finance reforms, and geographic discontinuity models that exploit differences in state funding policies. For every ten-percentage point increase in local revenue share, mean achievement rises by 0.05 standard deviations (sd) and socio-economic achievement gaps widen by 0.03sd. Voice and exit channels moderate the size of the efficiency-equity trade-off. Implications for inter-governmental grant policy are discussed.

AbstractMany public services in the United States are administered through non‐state actors, many of which are nonprofits with broad social missions. Some scholars show that contracting these organizations can compromise their broader goals and political activities, while others find that such arrangements empower the organizations to engage in advocacy and influence policy. We argue that not only can contracting strengthen nonprofits' capacities to engage in politics and advance their missions, but it can mobilize political activity among those working for and engaging with the nonprofits. We use the case of Teach For America (TFA) and an instrumental variable approach that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of TFA's arrival in states to show that contracting TFA is related with the arrival of new education reform advocacy groups spearheaded by TFA alumni. This, in addition to TFA's direct efforts, leads to the passage of reform policies—especially charter school laws.

AbstractGlobal Performance Assessments (GPAs), which rank countries on a range of policy areas, can encourage domestic demands for policy reform. Yet can they also affect at what level of government—local or national—citizens want reform to take place? We theorize that, by emphasizing how countries fare relative to others, GPAs prompt citizens to view domestic policy underperformance as a "national problem requiring national solutions." This increases calls for vesting policymaking authority in the hands of central governments. We argue that this effect should be most salient when underperformance is presented as a threat to a country's security because it induces citizens to "rally 'round the flag." To test our theory, we field an original survey experiment in the United States using fictitious news articles manipulating both the source of performance monitoring information and how it is presented. In line with our prediction, respondents are most likely to demand policy centralization when underperformance is framed using GPAs and citizens are primed to think of low scores as a threat to their country's security. These results indicate that GPAs could eventually increase calls for expanding the purview of national‐level politicians over policymaking.

Our research shows that citizens of the hardest-hit countries by COVID-19 are changing their attitudes and becoming more willing to make concessions in terms of privacy and freedom of movement. An overwhelming majority of Italians (79 %) and Spaniards (67 %) support the implementation of restrictive tracking systems like the ones deployed in China. The number of citizens that are willing to reduce their privacy through more CCTV or social network surveillance by governments has also grown in the span of three months by 19 % in China, 15 % in Italy, and 4 % in Spain.