Correlates of the Acceptability of Discussing UBI Policies in South Korea

Abstract

Public policy opinion research tends to focus on mass agreement with policy positions and support for politicians. An underexplored area in public opinion research concerns the range of policies that people find acceptable, otherwise known as the Overton Window. In this study, I reposition the Overton Window as a set of norms about what types of policy opinions are legitimate in public discourse. Drawing on a variety of literatures, I develop some baseline expectations about the range of acceptable discourse and I test them using a novel internet survey conducted in South Korea. The results of the analysis provide some evidence for the existence of social norms regarding opinions associated with Universal Basic Income (UBI), but they also reveal significant partisan divides on the bounds of acceptable speech.