Conservatives hate the UBI inevitably

Across all but 2 social policies, support was higher among those favoring a stronger governmental role in society relative to those favoring a weaker governmental role (Figure 1). For 2 unemployment policies—tax credits to businesses and public spending on construction projects—support was equally high for both. Other than these 2 policies, differences in support based on beliefs about the appropriate role of government persisted even in analyses including measures of political party affiliation (results not shown). We did not identify significant differences in support when comparing those living in states with the highest and the lowest case-fatality rates in early April 2020 (results not shown).

I focus on the US for two reasons. First, due to racialized politics, the negative stereotypes of welfare recipients are especially strong among American conservatives. As many conservatives believe that welfare programs disproportionately benefit Black Americans, they regard welfare with fundamental disdain (Gilens, 1999). Yet, the universality and unconditionality of UBI allow working classes of all races to benefit from the policy, thereby blurring racial lines. As such, UBI could potentially neutralize racial animus among conservative opponents, forming a basis for conservatives to be persuadable in reducing their opposition to UBI.

Second, while there is a burgeoning literature on UBI in the European context (e.g., Legein et al. 2018; Parolin & Siöland, 2020; Roosma & van Oorschot, 2020; Rossetti et al., 2020; Stadelmann-Steffen & Dermont, 2020), little research has been done to understand UBI public opinion in the US. Yet, American attitudes toward UBI may be systematically different. For instance, a cross-country study by Ipsos (2017) has shown that Americans—compared to citizens from 11 other countries—are most likely to think that UBI will make people reliant on the state for income and that it will discourage people from working. Such nuances call for more scholarly attention to the study of American public opinion on UBI.

My experimental results suggest a null framing effect. Conservatives—identified by using 10 policy statements—remain strongly opposed to UBI even after they are presented with the equalizing-opportunity or limiting-government frame. There is also no evidence that they are more responsive to such frames than liberals are, even when these frames are particularly designed to highlight the compatibility of UBI with conservative ideals. A systematic analysis of open-ended responses shows that, despite the framing, how conservatives explain their opposition to UBI remains unchanged. To probe the mechanism further, I provide suggestive evidence that conservatives’ rigid opposition to UBI is complicated by partisanship: most conservatives, who are also Republicans, naturally associate UBI with the Democratic Party—despite the carefully designed vignettes that do not explicitly prime their partisanship. Interestingly, this is unlikely due to their prior political exposure to UBI: many of them have not even heard of UBI before. UBI is already politicized on conservatives’ mind before politicians politicize the policy to them.

Taken together, the findings suggest that even if UBI has unique features that fit the conservative ideology, exploiting such features to make ideological appeals is still unlikely to be effective. An important implication is that, unlike many past instances where issue framing has proven effective in shaping welfare attitudes (Brooks, 2012; Jacoby, 2000; Nelson, 2011; Nelson & Kinder, 1996; Winter, 2006), pro-UBI politicians would need to go beyond such tactics to persuade their electorate. Even if UBI is considered by many as a timely policy response to technological advances and structural inequality, its political feasibility may be much more limited than previously thought.