Faculty Sponsor: Valerie Nazzaro
Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Sangye Sherpa
I am a sophomore studying Mathematics and English at Wesleyan University. I have a keen interest in natural language processing and its applications digital humanities work. Entering this course with a background consisting mostly of language projects and data scraping adventures I was eager to try something that actively involved real people. I settled on welfare spending in light of the government shutdown this fall, which sparked my interest in examining issues that break traditional preference trends.
Abstract: American attitudes toward government welfare spending vary substantially across socioeconomic groups. This project examines how income, education, sex, and race relate to preferences for government spending on welfare. Data was taken from the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Higher income groups consistently expressed more support for welfare spending compared to lower income groups. After controlling for sex, income remained a statistically significant predictor of welfare attitudes, while sex showed no independent association. Race and education, however, exhibited strong independent relationships with welfare spending preferences, and the inclusion of race altered the structure of the income–welfare relationship. These results suggest that material conditions play a large role in shaping welfare attitudes. They also underscore the importance of demographic context in understanding public support for redistributive policies.
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