Collective risks and social insurance attitudes in low coverage settings

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Lisa Hall, a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at IBEI and a PhD candidate at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

How does exposure to different types of risk shape support for public social insurance? This paper examines whether idiosyncratic and covariate risks influence attitudes toward risk pooling in settings where formal insurance coverage is limited. Existing research on social insurance preferences highlights either redistribution-based explanations, which emphasise inequality and class interests, or risk-based explanations, which assume that exposure to illness or income loss increases support for public provision. However, contrary to those theories, in many low- and middle-income contexts, both the supply of and demand for formal insurance remain low despite high inequality and vulnerability. A central explanatory factor is the role of informal safety nets: kinship and community networks often cushion idiosyncratic shocks such as illness, injury, or death within households, reducing the perceived need for state involvement. Yet these informal systems have limited capacity when shocks are covariate and affect many households simultaneously. Under such conditions vulnerability becomes shared and public risk pooling may become more relevant. To assess this, the author draws on nationally representative survey data from eleven Sub Saharan African countries linked with local measures of drought and flood exposure. The results show that idiosyncratic shocks on their own weakly predict greater support for public social insurance, whereas individuals experiencing overlapping idiosyncratic and covariate shocks express significantly stronger support. This indicates that in settings with high informality, collective, rather than idiosyncratic, experiences of risk are central to the formation of social insurance preferences.

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