Public Opinion and the Welfare State: The United States in Comparative Perspective

To what extent do citizens of the United States and other countries prefer particular social welfare policies? How have these opinions changed over the last twenty years? What have been the effects of these preferences on government policies? This article reviews some of the empirical English language literature that has directly or indirectly considered these matters by examining nationallevel survey data. ' Although we initially expected an investigation of this research to be a mammoth undertaking, we found that the literature was not very extensive.