Suchergebnisse

The article investigates whether and how Italians' attitudes towards the role of the state and the market have changed between 1990 and 2020. Specifically, it will investigate two sets of opposite attitudes: individualism versus collectivism, and free market liberalism versus statism. Two opposing macro hypotheses are considered. The first is that Italian citizens adopt attitudes that are in line with policy trends (policy feedback), while the second is that there is a tendency to develop a compensatory reaction (thermostat effect). In fact, the regulation of Italian capitalism has seen important changes in the last thirty years in Italy. Economic and social policies have undergone reform processes in the direction of deregulation and privatization. Moreover, the article seeks to understand whether and to what extent belonging to a given social class influences these attitudes. The findings show that the influence of class has continued to be significant over the period, though it has weakened overall as a result of convergence towards collectivist-statist values. This trend can be interpreted as reflecting a thermostat effect.

This article investigates attitudes towards the conditionality of benefits targeted to a specific needy group, the unemployed, and analyses their relationship with the structure of income inequality. The focus is on the deservingness of welfare recipients. The public seems to use five criteria to define deservingness and, consequently, the conditionality to which public support is subjected: need, attitude (i.e. gratefulness), control (over neediness), reciprocity (of giving and receiving) and identity, that is the similarity or proximity between the providers of public support (the taxpayers) and the people who should receive it. People's willingness to help depends on how close they consider benefit recipients to be to themselves (i.e. the extent to which they belong to the same in-group). The identity criterion is the main object of our investigation. We argue that the operation of this criterion at the micro-level can be affected by macro-level variables. Specifically, we focus on different measures of the structure of income inequality which are indicators of the social distance between welfare recipients and taxpayers. Based on data from three waves of the European Values Study (1990–2008) collected in 30 countries, the study offers a comparative and longitudinal analysis. The picture emerging from the within-country analysis – which removed much of the between-country heterogeneity − shows that when the social distance grows, it is more difficult for the majority of citizens (upper and middle classes) to identify with the unemployed.

Previous survey studies on the perceived fairness of the division of housework have suffered from limitations resulting from the use of observational data, namely reverse causation, unobserved heterogeneity, and the difficulty of estimating more than one causal effect at once. This article overcomes these limitations by using an innovative method in this research field: a survey‐based vignette design combining the benefits of experiments with a higher capability of generalization. From our findings based on Italian primary data, we argue that equity and gender ideology theories explain different elements of the fairness evaluation process and are not mutually exclusive. Consistent with equity theory, under certain conditions it is considered fair to exchange paid and unpaid time. However, unlike equity theory, the economic value of time is not an issue. Moreover, a request to renegotiate housework is more legitimate if it redresses a prior inequity and, for women, irrespective of the asker's gender. Gender ideology affects partners' equity considerations, weighting their contribution to paid and unpaid work differently.

A long-standing theoretical tradition underlines the importance of comparison referents for fairness evaluation, i.e., people, experiences and expectations that individuals choose to compare with their own situation. However, few studies on perceived fairness of housework division have measured and tested comparison referents, partly because of the lack of suitable data. Moreover, findings were sometimes mixed because small convenience samples were used. Previous literature also neglected the distortive effects of self-serving bias in the choice of referents. This study, conducted in an Italian context, seeks to overcome these limitations by using a probabilistic sample and two different designs: a survey data analysis and an experimental-vignette technique which avoids the distortions of self-serving bias. The survey's findings reveal that the effects of comparison referents are strong and in line with expectations, though limited to the domestic behavior of male referents. Moreover, unfavorable comparisons have a stronger effect on perceived fairness than favorable ones. The vignette analysis indicates that comparison referents affect perceived housework fairness even if the effect of self-serving bias is controlled for.