CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Szabó, Krisztina |
|---|---|
| Title | The Political Economy of Transfers, Public Opinion and Policy Preferences |
| Summary | Transfers of public policies as well as external transfers affect the behaviors and attitudes among the mass public. This dissertation explores the ways in which transfers affect the behavior and public opinion among program clienteles and howpolitics can alter attitudes of the mass public. Chapter 2 focuses on the effect of an external transfer on the stability of a country and estimates the impact of shocks in foreign aid disbursement on conflict in poor countries. By proposing a new instrumental variable approach, the main findings indicate that negative (positive) aid shocks increase (decrease) one-sided conflict from the opposition suggesting that negative aid shocks primarily trigger social unrest from the population; and the effect of negative aid shocks on one-sided conflict from the opposition is especially large in countries with weak state capacity. Rather than analyzing the effect of an external transfer, Chapter 3 turns to the question of how the mass public reacts to transfers resulting from a public policy. The Chapter examines the electoral effect of two subsidy programs targeting rural areas in Hungary. The policies were introduced in July 2019, shortly after the European Parliament elections in May 2019 and just before the local elections in October 2019 that allows us to rely on a difference in differences estimation strategy. At the same time, this Chapter looks at how the government designs its targeted distributive strategy. We find that incumbent vote share increases in settlements that were eligible for the programs relative to noneligible settlements and that the government targeted its core supporters with the aim of mobilizing them (rather than pursuing swing voters). While Chapter 3 provides evidence for the effect of a targeted government transfer on voting behavior, Chapter 4 analyzes the effect of yet another government transfer program not only on party preferences but also on howthe mass public views the appropriateness of supporting a party based on material handouts. Given that people are reluctant to admit that they support a party based on material rewards (that is called social desirability bias), we employ a list experiment technique. Our results suggest that the pre-election transfers worked mainly by demobilizing voters who might have opposed the incumbent party, while the findings show that the material rewards influenced the party preference of around 20% of the incumbent voters. Finally, while Chapters 3 and 4 show how the mass public reacts to public policies and targeted transfers, Chapter 5 demonstrates that other exogenous events are also able to shape public attitudes. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with original survey data, we study public opinion towards immigrants in Hungary during the refugee crises of 2015-16 and 2022. We demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. |
| Supervisor | Brown, Caitlin |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/szabo_krisztina.pdf |
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