Support for Disability Policies and Rights
By Monica C. Schneider, Dara Z. Strolovitch, and Justin W. Holmes
Edited by Andrew Mangan, Senior Editor, Data for Progress
The escalating number of cases of coronavirus in the United States, combined with widespread shortages of necessary medical supplies and limited hospital capacities, has exposed state policies that would explicitly discriminate against people with intellectual disabilities when rationing healthcare. This is only the latest instance in a long history of discrimination and stigmatization of people with disabilities. For instance, the Supreme Court decision in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, which allows for the sterilization of people with disabilities, has never been overturned. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed thirty years ago, represents some progress for people with disabilities, but such progress has been uneven. Many states, for example, currently have laws that limit voting rights for people with psychiatric conditions and/or intellectual disabilities.
People with disabilities constitute a significant portion of the US population—anywhere from around 13 percent to 26 percent, depending on how disability is defined. Most of us will experience or live with a disability during at least part of our lives. People with disabilities also have unique interests and needs, from medical care and underemployment to voting rights and education. Federal, state, and local governments together spend billions of dollars on programs that are designed specifically for people with disabilities—such as Social Security Disability Insurance—as well as on others—such as Medicaid—that were designed to help people with disabilities as well as members of other vulnerable groups.
But in spite of the clear and ongoing salience, relevance, and impact of disability-related issues and policies, we know relatively little about the extent and depth of Americans’ support for policies that confer rights and resources to people with disabilities, and we know even less about their attitudes about expanding them. We tried to shed some light on these questions. To do so, we partnered with Data for Progress to survey three thousand American adults about their views about five current disability-related policies:
Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is income assistance for people with disabilities whose income is low enough to meet the threshold
Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is income assistance to people with a disability who have worked and paid Social Security taxes
Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income people, including those with disabilities
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which provides a “free and appropriate public education” to eligible children with a disability
Section 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows companies to pay people with disabilities subminimum wage
In each polling item, we first explained the goal of the relevant policy and made clear how it benefits people with disabilities. We then asked respondents to tell us whether they strongly oppose, oppose, somewhat oppose, neither support nor oppose, somewhat support, support, or strongly support the policy.
We also asked respondents about their levels of support for or opposition to voting rights for a range of groups, including people who have been convicted of a felony offense and have since been released from prison, people who have been convicted of a felony offense and are currently in prison, people who are living in the US legally but are not citizens, seventeen-year-olds, people who have been diagnosed with an intellectual disability such as Down syndrome, and people who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia.
The survey was conducted by Data for Progress using the Lucid panel, from October 15 through October 18, 2019. We weighted the responses by gender, age, region, education, race, and education to provide a nationally representative sample.
The data show evidence of widespread support for policies that benefit people with disabilities. The most overwhelming support was expressed for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Medicaid, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which were supported by over 70 percent of respondents. Conversely, only about 10 percent of respondents expressed any kind of opposition to these policies. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) received less support (and slightly more opposition), but over two-thirds of respondents nonetheless expressed some level of support for that policy.
Our data also give us information about some of the determinants of this support. For example, as we might expect, people who have frequent contact with someone who has a disability or who have a disability themselves are more in favor of these policies than people who have not themselves experienced a disability or who are not in regular contact with someone who does. The graph below illustrates this general pattern using the example of support for SSDI. It shows that there is less support for SSDI among respondents who interact with a person with a disability less than once a month than there is among respondents who interact with a person with a disability once a week or more. Respondents who have experienced a personal disability are also more likely to express support for SSDI compared to respondents who have not themselves experienced a disability.
Our data also show that most respondents support stronger workplace protections for people with disabilities. Asked about their support for Section 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act (which allows companies to pay people with disabilities based on the company’s determination of productivity, and which typically results in sub-minimum wage pay, often as low as $1 an hour or less for people with disabilities), roughly 72 percent of people opposed this policy. And while there were somewhat higher levels of opposition among women (75 percent) than among men (70 percent) and among people who identified as liberals (78 percent) than among people who identified as conservatives (69 percent), levels of opposition to this policy were nonetheless still quite high among members of all groups.
As was the case for SSDI, people who have frequent contact with someone who has a disability were more likely to support stronger workplace protections for people with disabilities. Approximately 76 percent of people who said that they had frequent interactions with someone who has a disability and people who reported having one themselves opposed Section 14c, compared to 69 percent of respondents who reported only infrequent interactions, and 71 percent of respondents who did not report living with a disability.
The data suggest that attitudes about voting rights for people with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric illnesses are more complicated than they are when it comes to other disability-related policies. For example, at about a third of respondents, support for voting rights for people with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric illnesses is lower than the levels of support for voting rights for people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences (46 percent) but higher than levels of support for voting rights for seventeen-year-olds (24 percent), currently incarcerated felons (21 percent), and undocumented immigrants (12 percent).
Together, these data demonstrate that there is widespread support for many—though not all—rights and benefits for people with disabilities. Furthermore, the data suggest that there is also room to expand them. Although the survey results provide some sense about Americans’ thoughts on these issues, we hope that future surveys of public attitudes will include more questions about these crucial rights and benefits. Such data should be combined with surveys designed to understand the policy attitudes and priorities of people with disabilities themselves. This would complement the efforts of #CripTheVote and of the recent Democratic presidential candidates in bringing this important and long-neglected area of law and public policy to the attention of the American public.
Monica C. Schneider is Associate Professor of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Dara Z. Strolovitch is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.
Justin W. Holmes is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Northern Iowa.