"It Shouldn't Be Me:" Self-Evaluations of Deservingness Among Middle-Income CARES Recipients

How do Americans weigh their self-interest and ideology when forming opinions about government aid? The Coronavirus Aid and Relief Economic Security Act sent “stimulus” checks broadly to households, creating an opportunity for Americans across incomes to be confronted with understanding personal welfare receipt. In this paper, I interrogate how atypical recipients reconcile the self-interest of using this aid if it goes against their policy ideology. Using qualitative data from thirty semi-structured interviews with middle-income recipients in North Carolina, I find that participants did experience misalignment between their self-interest and ideology but used the checks on themselves without changing their ideology. Participants maintained both ideology and self-interest by employing cognitive resolution strategies suggested by cognitive dissonance theory (CDT). This study of a novel welfare case reinforces the ideological saliency of need-based welfare deservingness in the U.S. and argues for applying CDT to public opinion research when self-interest and ideology are examined.