I have a new paper titled ‘Personal politics? Health care policies, personal experiences and government attitudes’ in the new issue of Journal of European Social Policy. Here is the abstract:

Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective and objective personal experiences from the International Social Survey Programme to macro-level policy indicators. The analysis provides strong support for the expectation and contributes to a growing body of literature interested in the underpinnings of government attitudes in a comparative perspective.

The manuscript aims to explore why there is substantial variation in the relationship between people’s personal experiences and their government attitudes, as illustrated below.

The key finding is that when healthcare is publicly financed, people will rely less on their own personal experiences. You can find the article here. As always, you can find the replication material at the Harvard Dataverse and GitHub.

This is the fourth published article from my PhD. I also believe it is going to be the last.