Who deserves the spot? Attitudes towards priorities in access to subsidised childcare
通过2021年在六个西方国家进行的调查实验，研究了公众对补贴性托育服务优先权的态度，发现需要和身份（国籍和居住时长）是决定优先权归属的关键因素，且不同国家模式反映了社会投资的三种类型。
Research on perceptions of deservingness has so far mainly focused on cash benefits. We correct this imbalance by studying public attitudes towards access to social investment services, specifically, subsidised childcare. Based on the well-established corpus of deservingness research and recent work on varieties of social investment, we expect the traditional deservingness criteria to matter and for results to vary across countries. To test our argument, we rely on an original survey experiment conducted in 2021 in six Western countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the USA). We find that cross-national patterns of responses broadly reflect the categorisation of three types of social investments, that is, inclusive, stratified and targeted social investment. Further, we find that some of the well-known determinants of deservingness perceptions play an important role in the attribution of priorities of parents who need childcare: most clearly need and identity (operationalised with the parents’ nationality and their length of residency). This is true in all six countries covered. We conclude that patterns of deservingness perceptions to subsidised childcare services are determined by a mix of institutional factors (that differ across welfare regimes) and more fundamental attitudes towards helping those in need.