Predictors of Support for State Social Welfare Provision in Russia and China

This essay analyses the determinants of support for state social welfare provision in Russia and China on the basis of a four-stage recursive model using two waves of the World Values Survey. It hypothesises that support is a function of economic self-interest, tapped by subjective economic satisfaction and relative income; ideology including beliefs about market fairness and inequality aversion; as well as temporal context. It finds that subjective economic satisfaction reduces support; inequality aversion is a positive influence, while beliefs about market fairness matter in different ways. Support increased over the period spanning the 2008 global financial crisis. THEORIES ABOUT SOURCES OF SUPPORT FOR STATE SOCIAL welfare provision focus on two kinds of individual-level determinants: economic interest, which is thought to underpin class cleavages, occupational risks and short-term pocket-book effects (Iversen & Soskice 2001; Cusack et al. 2006; Rehm 2009, 2011; Margalit 2013); and ideology, which covers both normative preferences or ‘welfare values’ and beliefs about how the economy works in practice (Della Fave 1980, 1986; Kluegel & Smith 1986; Evans 1997; Fong 2001; Alesina & Glaeser 2004; Alesina & Angelotos 2005). Alongside these ‘individual-level factors’ are variations in context, incorporating historical legacies, policies and performance. Which of these three perspectives, economic self-interest, ideology or context, best explain the recent dynamics of support for state social welfare provision in China and Russia? And what are the implications for the ways in which we understand the politics of distributive justice in these two postsocialist countries? To begin to answer these questions, this essay takes a close look at the dynamics of popular support for state social welfare provision in China and Russia over the half decade spanning the 2008 financial crisis. The Chinese and Soviet command economies left different legacies for attitudes to distributive justice questions. For example, the Chinese experience of the command economy was much shorter in duration than the Soviet one. Between the start of the first Five Year Plan in 1953, and the launching of economic reforms at the Third Plenum in 1978, only a quarter century elapsed. The equivalent dates in Soviet history would be the start of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, and, at the earliest, the passing of the law on cooperatives in 1988, spanning 60 years. ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/17/1000053–23 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2016.1265643 This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/J012688/1).