Episode 2: The Government-Citizen Disconnect with Suzanne Mettler

Hello. Welcome to the second episode of the Policy Agendas podcast. I’m E.J. Fagin,

the project manager of the Policy Agendas Project. Today, I am joined by two wonderful

co-hosts. The first is Christine Bird, Esquire. I don’t go by Esquire because my mother

would be embarrassed. But Christine Bird Christine Bird will soon be Dr. Christine Bird, Esquire, which

is a wonderful dual title. And Brooke Shannon. Hello. No, Esquire. No Esquire. Yeah.

So. So we just record a great episode. So I would ask Christine what was on the agenda? What is

on the agenda for this episode? So today we talk to Suzanne Mettler, the author of The Government’s Citizen Disconnect,

as her newest book. It just came out in 2013. And it’s a follow up to a previous book called

The Submerged State that I think she published in 2009. In this book, she goes into why

citizens have particular views about social policy that they interact with and how that relates

to their participation in government. And so we had a great conversation her coming up.

It was a great experience, Brooke. Yeah, some of the takeaways I found from Mettler

were just fascinating how this book builds on the submerged state. So when it came out in 2011,

it really focused on like the earned income tax credit, the Affordable Care Act and things like these tax

policies that are sort of like muddled by the government, so much so that people don’t really know what they are

and how they they fit into everyday people’s lives. And discussing

with Dr. Mettler about how these policies translate into like who gets elected, how

people view their own participation and efficacy in government, how the government works for them.

I think is especially prescient right now, given the midterms that we just passed,

that given the state of American politics. But yeah, I think there were a lot of takeaways in terms of policy prescriptions,

what’s possible in government and what’s possible and participation. It was a fantastic interview.

Yeah. I really am excited for it. And they’ll come. I mean, just have a few kind of low clerical things before we do that.

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forward to doing this podcast with you. So with that, here is Professor Suzanne Mettler.

We’re now joined by Professor Suzanne Mettler, she’s the Clinton Rossiter professor of American institutions

and the government department at Cornell University and the author of The Government Says and Disconnect.

Suzanne, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I’m delighted to be chatting with you. Yeah, we are. We’re really excited

to talk about this book. This book is in many ways a follow up to the submerged state. In many

ways a pretty large extension of the submerged state going into some areas that died of that book do.

We’d like to start by asking you, can you summarize this book for our audience? Yes, certainly.

So what I look at in this book is, well, I did kind of a big overview

of what does the American welfare state look like these days in terms of

who’s covered by policies, how many policies does the average person experience

and how does it all add up? And what I came to is a paradox.

And I call that the government’s citizen disconnect. And what I mean by that is that there is

a growing gulf between the role that government actually plays in Americans lives

and their overall assessment and response to it. So what I found

is that the average person has used several social policies

from the federal government across the course of their lives. But

despite that and you know, this is this has been growing over time and it’s more common than it was

in the past to it to a very large extent. And it cuts across all sorts

of boundaries by income group and partisanship and age group, et cetera,

and geographically cuts across all areas of the United States.

And yet people have very poor assessments of government

on all sorts of indicators that survey researchers have tracked over time, like trust in government

and what we call in political science, political efficacy, external efficacy, people’s

view about whether government is responsive to people like them. Their

view about whether public officials care about people like them, etc. On all of these measures,

in the middle of the 20th century, Americans had pretty positive views of government

and it’s been declining over time. It declined a lot in the late 1960s, early 1970s

around Vietnam and Watergate, etc. But what’s so paradoxical now

is that in recent decades Americans have come to rely upon government more than ever

and yet still have these very low and increasingly low assessments of government.

OK, so your previous work for Samaj State addressed some of these issues, but in a much more narrow fashion.

So could you explain the differences between the two books? Yes. So in a submerged state,

I’d been working on this larger project already. And then during when I was

trying to understand what was happening with the Obama administration, I ended up writing that short book, The

Submerged State. And in it, I developed this concept of policies

that are submerged by their design that makes it difficult

for for people to realize that government is helping them with

social benefits. In most cases, these policies that I call submerged are channeled through

the tax code, their tax expenditures and some of them have other designs,

such as I called student loans submerged up through their

private banks. And then there are policies like employer provided health and retirement

benefits that combine private organizations actually channeling

policies, but they’re subsidized by government through the tax code. So

I really explored that concept in that book and here I build on it

in the government’s citizen disconnect because I’m really puzzled by

why we have this disconnect. And I thought that it would come down to policy design

in which policy whether people had experienced policies that were mostly submerged or

had more visible designs. And I find that, you know, that is the case.

People who used mostly submerged policies have no bearing that

I can tell on their attitudes about government. And so their attitudes about government are driven by

other things. But even people who’ve used lots of visible policies.

What I found in this book and really surprised me is that even those experiences

don’t seem to affect their attitudes about government very much.

So in this book, I lay out broadly what people’s experiences of government

add up to the numbers of policies and types of policies they’ve used. And then I try to delve

into that question of why is there this disconnect? And I also look at.

The relationship between peoples use of different policies and their participation

in politics are not what we’re segway right to talking, but about participation.

You know, given that we’ve we’ve had a recent election that has some interesting, I think things to say the Earth

science to this book. I think, Christiane, this is gonna take us away there. Yes. This book, the government’s citizen

disconnect, actually draws a connection between the disconnect and the

not understanding the submerged state and voting behavior. So you do a survey,

but you draw data from for this book. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you made that connection.

Yeah, that’s right. Now, when I probe the relationship to political participation

in this book, I’m not making causal arguments. I didn’t have the data

that would allow me to do that. And there are various scholars now who are are

finding ways to do that, exploring, you know, one policy at a time. But here

I’m trying to kind of look at how people’s aggregated experiences over time matter.

And so I’m looking at relationships. And what I find is that there

is a participatory tilt when it comes to voting and all kinds of other political participation

as well. And that is that the people who participate the most in politics

are people who have used plenty of social policies, but policies with these

submerged designs and these tend to be people who are not thinking

much at all about how government has helped them personally. And they

also tend to be less supportive of expanding social

policies. By contrast, people who used lots of visible policies are the

most likely to be aware of government’s role in their own lives, at least along a couple of dimensions.

And they also, having used more of these policies, is a determinant

of being more supportive of more generous social policies generally and expanding,

expanding health care provision and so on. But those people with

those attitudes are much less likely to participate in politics. They’re less likely to

vote. They’re less likely to do all kinds of other things that we track in surveys. So

there’s this participatory tilt. And, you know, the voices that elected

officials hear from and the voices that actually choose those elected officials are a

biased group in that respect. So speaking about health care and

social policy in particular, we just had an election. And

one of the surprising, I think takeaways from the 2010 midterms was the amount of states

that in fact voted to expand Medicaid. And there were some surprises in the states that did it

based on the government’s ideological tilt and the typical view that we have of the citizens

in those states. Can you speak on that a little bit? Was that a surprise for you that Medicaid

would be sort of embraced and these are at least the expansions would occur

in these types of states? I’m delighted to speak about this. And this draws

my answer here is going to draw on a combination of this book that I’ve just written

and also my ongoing work with Larry Jacobs about the Affordable Care

Act. We’ve been doing the panel study since 2010 and we’re looking at policy

feedback effects of it. And the results of the election

could be very well predicted by the insights from these two projects

combined. So in the book that I’ve just written, the Government Citizen Disconnect,

I’m not looking at policy feedback effects in the way people usually do when they’re looking at

a policy. For example, the way Andrea Campbell did in her work on Social Security and Medicare.

And there she’s looking at whether people become more active in politics

with an eye toward expanding and preserving and protecting that particular

policy that benefits them. And, you know, those kinds of feedback effects

do occur with various different policies. And we’re seeing more research about that all the time.

What I was doing in this book was looking at whether people extrapolate further

from their policy experiences toward government generally and whether it affects their attitudes

about government generally. And I found that that doesn’t happen very much.

People don’t connect the dots. And what we saw in this election really reflects

this kind of disjuncture where we saw that in various

red states where people elected Republicans to send them back

to the Senate. And these are people who have said for years that they want to repeal the Affordable Care

Act. They’re sending those folks back to office. And yet at the same time,

they were voting, too, for their own states to adopt, expand. Did Medicaid

under the Affordable Care Act? So it’s a disjuncture and it’s exactly what

these two projects point to and the way I explain this is that it’s like a paradox

that Political Scientist 3 and Cantrill discovered way back in the 1960s

that Americans are. If you look at public opinion, Americans are

at one in the same time philosophically conservative and

in utilitarian terms, they act like liberals. So if people are asked broad

questions about the size of government and the extent of taxes,

they will sound like conservatives. They want small government, low taxes, etc.

So philosophically speaking, on these abstract principles, they sound conservative. And

yet if people are asked about their support for all sorts of specific policies and whether

we should have more funding for them or less, they sound like liberals. So in a utilitarian

sense, they’ll say yes. Let’s have, as it turns out, expanded Medicaid

under the Affordable Care Act, or let’s spend more money on Social Security or unemployment insurance

or food stamps, etc. So I think that’s what we’re seeing in these election results.

And it’s it’s quite fascinating. I mean, the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that

Republicans had rallied against it for years, seems to be on more firm

footing today because of this election. An important group of people missing, I think,

from from this book are elites. And I think it kind of comes up here as part of this discussion.

The puzzle you point out in this book is that you have a lot of people who receive government aid, who don’t like the federal government and

don’t seem to think that they benefit from that aid. But the reverse paradox, I think it’s also interesting that you’ve

a lot of people who give aid, who are more supportive or at least in the aggregate level are more supportive.

So I come from New Jersey, New Jersey. Our politicians always love to talk about how we’re a donor state and we don’t get

enough back from the federal government. But people in my district two weeks ago overwhelmingly supported

candidates who would increase the social spending to places like Kentucky and Mississippi in places that aren’t New Jersey.

Does the weird cleavage of the political parties kind of get in the way of citizen

attitudes toward policy? Is the problem that the people who represent the

poorest areas of the country tend to be Republicans and oppose social policy in the reverse of Democrats? That created an issue

here. Well, I did find the this very interesting geographic

divide. So if you look, I have these maps in the book where

I show the percentage of the average person’s income that comes from federal social transfers.

And with the particular data I use for the maps, it does not even include these policies that I’m calling

the submerged state. It’s 40 different direct social transfer policies.

And what it shows, it’s very interesting. If we go back to 1969,

the average American received seven percent of their of their income from the federal

government. And as of 2014, it’s up to 17 percent. Then if you look at

it by state, it’s grown in every state, all over the country, but the states

in which it tends to be highest. Several of them are very conservative states

that send not only Republicans to Congress, but Republicans who are these days

associated with the Freedom Caucus really want to scale back policies. And so,

yeah, there certainly is that kind of partisan divide on net.

I don’t find a clear partisan relationship between those things at the

state level nationwide and partisanship. Well, it’s

a factor in explaining this. It did not end up being the overriding factor that explains

it. I think that’s super interesting about the state breakdown. And so a question

that came up while reading this book about policy prescriptions and particular like access to higher

education, et cetera, really have the action has taken place at the state

and local level. So with these policies that are sort of indicative of marble cake

federalism, where the states and localities as well as the federal government

really share a lot of the roles and responsibilities. Where do the states come in

and the government citizen does connect and also in the submerged state? Well, I

was focused on policies that have funding from the federal government, although

these policies vary in the extent to which states have some discretion

and authority themselves over eligibility, over funding, et

cetera. I did not delve into that here.

You know, that’s certainly an interest of mine. It was what my my first book, Dividing Citizens looks

into. But I guess for that, you know, I would really point you toward the

wonderful book that came out this past year by my colleague Jamila Michener, focusing on

Medicaid and variation from state to state. Someone

could certainly delve in further and look at those kinds of relationships, but it’s

not something I did here. There’s marble cake, federalism get in the way of responsiveness as opposed

to federalism where duties are clearly delineated. But when you have some of these areas like Medicaid

that are kind of but are always kind of murky to people, does not really know who will get mad at her.

Oh, that’s a good question. So this is really a question of accountability.

So if people are receiving benefits, is the point that perhaps they don’t know which

level of government the benefits flow from? You know, I’m

I’m not sure about that. And it it is true that some policies.

I mean, for example, Medicaid now actually has many different names in different states.

And so that could cloud things somewhat. But I don’t think that really

explains away the puzzle that I’m finding because, you know, if anything

good policy, the people who benefit from these policies that tend to leave more authority to the states

tend to be lower income people in means tested policies. And they they’re the people who

are most aware that government has done something for them, whereas the policies that

benefit people who are more well-off are more likely to be nationalized policies.

So I don’t think that explains it. We’ve really enjoyed hearing you talk about the book, but I wanted to ask

you a little bit more about your choices when it came to what data to use and most

importantly, what’s on the cutting room floor. When it came to working on this project? Oh,

that’s a good question, because I worked on the project for years and years. So I think there was

a lot on the cutting room floor that I ended up putting aside. And

there is a lot more in these data that I’ve used and I’ve made them available on my Web

site so that other scholars can can do more with them. So I

used three data sets here. I used a survey that I had conducted

in 2008. And then I began to probe a little bit for the summered state book and did more with it here.

And I wish the data was more up to date, but it’s still the only existing data that we

have that asks all of these questions about people’s use of 21 different federal

social policies if they’ve ever used them, all sorts of follow up questions about

their experiences and then all of these attitudinal questions that you

know and participatory questions that we have in the American National Election Study, which

in you know, usually you have surveys that ask either one type of question or the other, but not these

two combined. So there’s a lot more to be done there. And one of the things on the cutting room

floor is that anytime a person said yes, that they had used a particular policy,

there were several follow up questions. And I really only began to use

those data to probe what people’s experiences were like. So there’s much more

to be done there. There were also more attitudinal questions

that I didn’t even begin to get into in this book that I think other scholars

can find to be useful. The second data set is one that I put together

myself over many years with the help of several graduate students working with me. And this

is historical data that looks over time at how

many Americans have used each of these social policies and

what the value of them is in real terms by individual or household.

And so all of that is available at my Web site and a lot more could be done with that.

And then the third data set that I used comes from the Bureau

of Economic Analysis, which is in the Commerce Department. And this is wonderful

data. And that’s that allowed me to look to create the maps where I’m looking at the state

level and average usage. And actually, I drill down to the county level using those data.

And so I used those only in, you know, a few ways. There’s a lot more that

I think political scientists should do with those data. That’s we’re gonna start wrapping up here. We like to ask here’s

where we’re going to begin asking all of our guests. You’re the first person. I get this question for our recommendation

in a recent work of political science that you read that you think more people should read. Oh, wow,

what a great question. So let’s see.

There are so many so many things that I would like to mention.

And as soon as we end this call, I’m going to think of, you know, ten others that I wish I’d I’d recommended.

But for me right now, a book that’s very important is How Democracies

Die, by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Zie Blot. So

here they are, comparative lists who are looking at the state of American politics

today and raising really valuable questions for us. I think

that for scholars of American politics, we’ve had a little harder time knowing how

to come at these questions. And I think that there are great concepts that are developed by comparatives

who study the rise and fall democracies around the world. So I really recommend that book

is very useful for getting us thinking in that direction. Do you think that Americans should study European populism

more than we do? Well, I think that that’s useful. But, you know, frankly,

I’m learning a lot from colleagues who study the rise involved democracy in countries around

the world, not just in Europe, but Latin America, Southeast Asia

and so on. So I think we need to broaden our lens in order to to understand what we’re going through.

Thank you very much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. The book is The Government Says and Disconnect. We’ll have a link to it

in the description below his podcast. And we look for during the next one. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed.