The underlying Public Attitude Toward Government Responsibility to Intervene in Socioeconomics, 30 Years of Evidence from the ISSP.

Since the first International Social Survey Program's Role of Government module, many scholars assumed the "ideal government responsibility role" battery measured effects of a single unobserved attitude across individuals and societies. Attempts to substantiate this assumption offer sparse confirmatory evidence. Therefore, this research brings the most data and comprehensive measurement models thus far to investigate a single underlying attitude. Data from 1986 to 2017 in 43 countries suggest a latent ideal role attitude; however, measurement varies somewhat by historical institutions and levels of development across societies. At first the data seem to fail metric invariance tests as a first step in establishing the latent attitude. When applying corrections for a potential second attitude toward social insurance, and allowing for diverse effects of GDP, socialism, or Communist authoritarian institutional legacies, metric invariance comes into focus to a degree that most critics find acceptable. These results setup further scalar testing and descriptively demonstrate the neoliberalizaiton of preferences over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]