Welfare receipt and multidimensional welfare attitudes: The potential roles of stigma and poverty attributions in South Korea

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between welfare receipt and multidimensional welfare attitudes within South Korea's productivist welfare model. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study and applying entropy balancing to control for selection bias, the analysis employs the Karlson–Holm–Breen method to decompose the total association between welfare receipt and welfare attitudes into components potentially linked to recipient stigma and individual-responsibility attributions. Because the pooled design cannot firmly establish the temporal ordering of welfare receipt, moral–cognitive evaluations, and welfare attitudes, these decompositions are interpreted as evidence of potential, rather than confirmed, mediating pathways. Results indicate welfare receipt is significantly associated with higher support for expanding welfare spending. Laziness-based stigma toward National Basic Livelihood Security System recipients accounts for approximately 41.51% of this association, consistent with a potential mediating pathway, while for universal welfare preferences this control-dimension stigma shows a suppression pattern, offsetting non-recipients' support by approximately 27.52%. Conversely, individual-responsibility attributions show no significant association with these outcome gaps. These findings suggest South Korean welfare attitudes are shaped more by moral evaluations of recipients' deservingness than by abstract beliefs about the causes of poverty, underscoring the importance of addressing institutionalized laziness-based stigma toward recipients in selective welfare systems to foster universal solidarity.