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Political Behavior
Published in: Political Behavior 4/2018

16-10-2017 | Original Paper

Beliefs About Corporate America and the Structure of Opinions Toward Privatization

Authors: Mark D. Ramirez, Paul G. Lewis

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2018

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Abstract

This research analyzes the individual-level factors associated with public support for the private provision of public goods and services. Given that privatization requires the transfer of authority from public to private entities, we argue that beliefs about private companies are an important and overlooked source of heterogeneity in explaining public policy preferences toward privatization. We test this expectation using survey data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that support for privatization is associated with positive beliefs about the motivation of private companies and with favorable views about corporate accountability relative to the accountability of government. Opposition to privatization is associated with beliefs about corporate influence in politics. Preferences for limited government are also associated with support for privatization. These results highlight the potential for beliefs about private companies to serve as a group heuristic in political reasoning and the ability of citizens to make reasoned choices on complex public policy issues.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
A search using alternative related keywords yielded similar results.
 
2
We searched Lexis-Nexis for all mentions of privatization 6 months prior to the implementation of the 2014 CCES, which corresponds to the 2014 mid-term elections. We found only three articles that mentioned privatization within the context of the 2014 mid-term elections where candidate positions on the issue were stated. Details are in the supplemental material.
 
3
That said, there is debate on whether public officials led public opinion regarding Social Security privatization during the 2000 presidential campaign (Lenz 2009) or if public officials merely primed existing opinions on the issue (Matthews 2017). The most recent evidence casts doubt that public officials were able to shape public opinion regarding Social Security privatization even after a sustained presidential campaign focusing on the issue (Matthews 2017). This provides some reassurance that any association between beliefs about private companies and support for privatization is not dependent on their shared association with the positioning of public officials. We also fail to find a consistent connection between evaluations of a range of candidates and respondents’ policy preferences for privatization in our data, which we should observe if candidates are involved in shaping public support on this issue. Details are in the supplemental material.
 
4
For instance, members of both parties continue to support the use of private contractors in military operations, Democratic and Republican candidates for elected office both receive contributions from private prison contractors, and Democratic-controlled as well as Republican-controlled municipal governments are involved in the privatization of local services (e.g., the privatization of parking meters in Chicago by the Democratic Daley administration).
 
5
By accessible and relevant we mean a policy debate where private companies can be easily seen as a stakeholder that might benefit from the enactment of the policy. This can occur naturally or via external signals from elite actors.
 
6
Smith (2000) does show a gradual decline in public confidence toward business during the 1970s. However, this decline coincided with a similar decline in trust in other American institutions, suggesting it was part of a broader national cultural change. Since that period, confidence in business has shown short-term fluctuations around a stable equilibrium.
 
7
A Promax rotation two factor solution also suggests the items represent a single dimension although there is some ambiguity as to whether a second dimension exists. Subsequently, we examine each privatization item individually in the supplementary material, which suggest some important distinctions in public support for privatizing non-coercive government functions versus coercive government functions.
 
8
We also asked about other organization such as the U.S. military and defense contractors. Since the former is not a private company, we did not use responses to these additional questions to form an index variable.
 
9
We also found that many respondents hold both positive and negative beliefs toward private companies, but that this does not result in ambivalence in their support for privatization. Indeed, scholars have documented a myriad of ways that citizens deal with conflicting beliefs toward an attitude object that does not necessarily result in ambivalence or internalized conflict (Alvarez and Brehm 2002; Jacoby 2006; Steenbergen and Brewer 2000). Exact estimates of respondents with divergent beliefs and estimates of the potential ambivalence resulting from these beliefs are in the supplemental material.
 
10
The Spearman correlation between union membership and the public employee variable is .17, suggesting the two are related, but should not pose a collinearity problem in the statistical models.
 
11
The approval of government measure is distinct from common measures of trust in government, which were not included in the 2014 CCES. A potential problem with an approval measure is that approval of current actors and institutions might be colored by partisan congruence between citizens and the partisanship of actors in office. We find a moderate negative correlation between partisanship and approval (− .29) suggesting Republicans are less approving of current institutions. Removing the Obama approval question from the measure reduces the correlation between partisanship and approval to .02. Estimates of support for privatization that include this latter measure are reported in the supplemental material.
 
12
The complete set of model estimates are reported in the supplementary material.
 
13
We tested the idea presented by Rudolph and Popp (2009) that ideology might condition the relationship between evaluations of government and support for privatization. Although they use a measure of trust in government, we use the approval of government measure available in the 2014 CCES. The interaction coefficient between ideology and approval of government is statistically insignificant, indicating that higher levels of approval among more conservative respondents has no relationship on support for privatization (Bols = − .44, p < .30). However, both constituent terms are statistically significant and in the expected direction hypothesized by Rudolph and Popp (2009). Higher levels of government approval among liberals is associated with support for privatization (Bols = .47, p < .09), while conservative ideology among those with who do not approve of the government also is associated with higher levels of support for privatization (Bols = .52, p < .01).
 
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Metadata
Title
Beliefs About Corporate America and the Structure of Opinions Toward Privatization
Authors
Mark D. Ramirez
Paul G. Lewis
Publication date
16-10-2017
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 4/2018
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9434-4

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