Beyond the Partisan Divide: A Serial Mediation Analysis of Fear of Crime, Social Ties, and Health on Welfare Attitudes

Background and Purpose: While political attitude is a known predictor of welfare support, the underlying psychosocial mechanisms that drive support across the ideological spectrum remain under-researched. This study moves beyond political labels to examine how individual perceptions of risk and social integration shape policy support. Guided by social solidarity theory and the risk society framework, this study hypothesized that:1. significant mean differences in welfare support exist across political attitudes;2. fear of crime indirectly influences welfare attitudes through a serial mediation of social ties and self-rated health; and 3. this mediating mechanism is invariant across political groups.

Methods: This study analyzed data from the 2024 General Social Survey (n = 2,554), a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. welfare support was treated as a latent construct validated via confirmatory factor analysis. The study used Structural Equation Modeling with 5,000 bootstrap re-samples to test the serial mediation effect. To ensure the "best possible choice" for analysis, multi-group analysis was used to test for measurement and structural invariance across liberal, moderate, and conservative groups.

Results: CFA indicated an excellent fit for the welfare attitude construct. ANOVA confirmed that liberals showed the highest support, followed by moderates and conservatives (p < .001). SEM results supported the serial mediation hypothesis (B = .001, 95% CI [0.000, 0.002]): fear of crime was associated with reduced social ties, which impacted health and subsequently decreased welfare support. Crucially, while metric invariance was not supported, the structural weights model showed no significant difference across groups (Δχ²(10) = 17.464, p = .065). This suggests the psychological pathway from risk perception to policy support is a "universal mechanism".

Conclusions and Implications: By identifying social ties as a vital mediator, the study suggests that interventions strengthening community social capital can effectively bridge the gap between individual risk perception and policy support. For practitioners, this highlights a "de-polarized" pathway for social development: framing the welfare safety net as a collective response to shared community risks—such as safety and health—rather than a partisan issue. This approach fosters broader social solidarity and community resilience in increasingly fragmented societies.