Putting the Fair in Welfare: Charting Shifts in Public Attitudes Towards Social Welfare Since the Emergence of Covid-19

My thesis examines whether the Covid-19 pandemic influenced public attitudes towards welfare in the United Kingdom and the United States. In order to make my analysis a cross-national one, I choose to analyze two countries rather than just one. I focus on the UK and US because they are two nations with a similar history, culture, and international power, yet with welfare states that are vastly different in size and scope. I source the public opinion survey data from the National Centre for Research (NatCen) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), gathering and cleaning data over a period of months beginning in April 2022 and ending in July 2022. In my thesis, I combine the data from eight key survey questions most relating to public attitude towards welfare. I concentrated on data from 2014 to 2021, to have input on public opinion preceding, at the height of, and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. I find that while the majority of public opinion trends examined do not undergo huge fluctuations since the Covid-19 pandemic, American respondents show steadily increasing support for welfare and somewhat support for income redistribution policies in a long-term trend since 2014, while British support for welfare increases from 2014 to 2019, while remaining largely stable during the pandemic.