Individual and contextual predictors of policy instruments attitudes

2019-2021

Principal Investigator: Arnošt Veselý

Funded by the Czech Science Foundation, this project deals with an empirical analysis of the factors influencing attitudes toward government policies (‘policy attitudes’). The goal of the project is to test the hypothesis that policy attitudes are influenced not only by the nature of the problem itself, but also by preference for a particular type of policy instrument (Béland and Howlett 2016). This “instrumental” hypothesis assumes that instrument preferences are predictable, and are influenced by both individual factors and the context in which people operate. The main source of data will be a representative survey of university students from various disciplines (N=3000), realized in the second year of the project. Differences in policy attitudes among students from different disciplines and in different years of study will be analysed to test whether those differences are better predicted by individual factors or by the context (discipline studied). This will be the first complex survey of the policy attitudes of Czech students, as well as the first large-scale survey that empirically tests the instrumental hypothesis. The goal of the project is, on the sample of Czech university students, to test the hypothesis that people form consistent attitudes on policy instruments. The research will also reveal to what extent these attitudes are formed by individual factors or by the context (discipline studied).