The Policy Feedback Effects of State Assistance: Did Small Business Bailouts Increase Support for Public Aid Programs?

We examine whether exposure to government assistance can generate positive policy feedback effects among constituencies not traditionally supportive of the welfare state. Focusing on the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a small business bailout enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how making government assistance salient affects attitudes toward social assistance programs among a typically Republican-leaning and relatively affluent group. Leveraging a bespoke survey of verified program recipients and an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that reminding PPP recipients of program participation increases support for government spending on healthcare, nutritional assistance, and unemployment benefits by an average of 6.9 percentage points—equivalent to roughly 16 percent of the partisan divide on these issues. The findings provide novel causal evidence that making the receipt of government assistance salient increases support for anti-poverty programs among well-off people, even when those programs do not directly benefit them.