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COVID-19 pandemic-related direct public support mechanisms have received more attention than previously and budgets for SME subsidies have skyrocketed around the globe. Currently, most support measures focus on short-term liquidity needs. However, policy makers have already started thinking about which role subsidies should play in the renewal of the economic structure once the pandemic dust has settled. The pandemic offers a good opportunity to restructure a company support system taking into account the structural barriers that innovation support systems have been subject to over the last decade. The aim of the analysis in this paper is threefold: (1) to map the barriers to innovation support, (2) to offer policy makers and SME support agencies a set of solutions to overcome these barriers and (3) to re-interpret these results against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic that started to unravel shortly after finalising the set of research interviews.

Purpose>In this paper, the authors investigate the factors that explain US public support for military operation for the enemy's enemy, and argue that US public support for military defense could be attributed to three factors – whether such support aligns with US national interests, whether the public perceives the US enemy to be a threat and whether interventions and military assistance to the enemy's enemy garner moral grounds.Design/methodology/approach>To find evidence of our claims, the authors conducted two survey experiments in 2018 and 2019 on Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to see whether the ongoing trade war between the US and China (enemy) would alter the public's willingness to provide military assistance to Taiwan (enemy's enemy).Findings>The authors first find that US national interests only matter when the public considers China's military to be not a threat when the US–China rivalry intensifies. In both waves, respondents were most likely to support for Taiwan's defense if they perceived China's military to be a major threat, followed by a minor threat and not a threat, respectively. Contrary to our theoretical expectation, the study does not find empirical support for moral factors.Originality/value>Our research applies the survey experiments among the US public to gauge public support for the enemy's enemy (Taiwan), which generates unique and vital findings to foreign policymakers and international observers.

This study explores the determinants of academic startups' orientation toward international business expansion, focusing on their technological capabilities, availability of public support, the regional characteristics of their locations, and the research standards of their parent universities. Using unique survey data on 448 academic startups in Japan and by estimating an ordered logit model, we find that academic startups are strongly oriented toward expanding their businesses internationally if they have strong technological capabilities, receive public support, are established in regions with a high ratio of exporting small firms, or are affiliated with a parent university with an excellent research reputation.

This study utilizes data from Korea’s Research and Development (R&D) grant program to examine the impact of receiving an R&D grant on a firm’s ability to obtain external financing, taking into account the heterogeneous effects based on firm size and characteristics. By employing the propensity score matching method, we establish the causal effect of R&D support on financing and discover that R&D grants have differential effects on debt and equity financing. Our findings indicate that larger firms are more likely to acquire subsequent debt financing, whereas small firms that receive R&D grants exhibit an increased likelihood of securing equity financing, particularly among young firms. Furthermore, we identify a certification effect of R&D grants, implying that such grants may serve as indicators of the potential success of small, young firms in the market. Collectively, this study illuminates the role of R&D grants in firms’ financing decisions, providing valuable insights for policymakers and firms seeking to secure external financing. First published online 12 December 2024

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.

Public support is a key determinant of whether any energy project is developed in democratic countries. In recent decades, scholars have extensively examined levels of support and opposition to energy infrastructure, often with a focus on so-called Not-in-My-Backyard (NIMBY) sentiments. As the need for energy infrastructure grows, so does the need to extract insights and lessons from this literature. In this systematic literature review, we evaluate decades of research to identify important trends in topical focus, research findings, and research design. We find a disproportionate focus on wind energy, followed by solar, fossil fuels, and transmission, with most studies conducted in the United States or United Kingdom, and that individuals are more often supportive of energy projects than they are opposed. Scholars have examined the role of many factors in understanding attitudes toward energy infrastructure, and often find knowledge, trust, and positive perceptions about the benefits of projects to be positively correlated with support for projects, although with variation across energy types. NIMBY attitudes differ widely in approach and are often plagued by problematic research designs that limit inferences and the generalizability of findings. We provide a detailed discussion of these limitations and suggest areas in which the literature can expand.

Public support has long been thought crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy also creates its own demand: through early-years socialization and later-life learning, the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces widespread public support for democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this article finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a negative thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion.

There has been great interest in the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in recent years, and particularly since Alesina and Glaeser’s (2004) influential work. Following literatures on solidarity and fractionalization, race in the U.S. welfare state, and anti-immigrant sentiments, many contend that immigration undermines public support for social policy. This study analyzes three measures of immigration and six welfare attitudes using 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for 17 affluent democracies. Based on multi-level and two-way fixed-effects models, our results mostly fail to support the generic hypothesis that immigration undermines public support for social policy. The percent foreign born, net migration, and the 10-year change in the percent foreign born all fail to have robust significant negative effects on welfare attitudes. There is evidence that the percent foreign born significantly undermines the welfare attitude that government “should provide a job for everyone who wants one.” However, there is more robust evidence that net migration and change in percent foreign born have positive effects on welfare attitudes. We conclude that the compensation and chauvinism hypotheses provide greater potential for future research, and we critically consider other ways immigration could undermine the welfare state. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that factors other than immigration are far more important for public support of social policy. En los últimos años ha surgido un gran interés en la relación entre la inmigración y el estado de bienestar, especialmente a partir del influyente trabajo de Alesina y Glaeser (2004). Con base en la literatura sobre solidaridad y fraccionalización, raza en el estado de bienestar estadounidense y sentimientos en contra de los inmigrantes, muchos sostienen que la inmigración debilita el apoyo público a las políticas sociales. En este estudio se analizan tres medidas sobre inmigración y seis actitudes relativas al bienestar. Para ello utilizamos datos de 17 democracias prósperas del Programa Internacional de Encuestas Sociales (ISSP, según sus siglas en inglés) de 1996 y 2006. Sobre la base de modelos multinivel y de efectos fijos de doble vía, en su mayoría nuestros resultados no logran dar sustento a la hipótesis genérica que sostiene que la inmigración debilita el apoyo público a las políticas sociales. Ni el porcentaje de nacidos en el extranjero, ni la migración neta ni el cambio en diez años del porcentaje de nacidos en el extranjero demostraron tener efectos negativos significativos en las actitudes relativas al bienestar. Existe evidencia de que el porcentaje de nacidos en el extranjero debilita significativamente la actitud relativa al bienestar que indica que el gobierno \"debería proporcionar un empleo a todo aquel que lo desee\". Sin embargo, existe evidencia más robusta que sugiere que la migración neta y el cambio en el porcentaje de nacidos en el extranjero tienen efectos positivos en las actitudes relativas al bienestar. Concluimos que las hipótesis de la compensación y del chauvinismo proporcionan un potencial mayor para futuras investigaciones y discutimos críticamente otros modos en que la inmigración puede debilitar el estado de bienestar. Por último, en este estudio se demuestra que otros factores distintos de la inmigración son mucho más importantes para el apoyo público a las políticas sociales.

Plant conservation initiatives lag behind and receive considerably less funding than animal conservation projects. We explored a potential reason for this bias: a tendency among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment. Experimental research and surveys have demonstrated higher preference for, superior recall of and better visual detection of animals compared with plants. This bias has been attributed to perceptual factors such as lack of motion by plants and the tendency of plants to visually blend together but also to cultural factors such as a greater focus on animals informal biological education. In contrast, ethnographic research reveals that many social groups have strong bonds with plants, including nonhierarchical kinship relationships. We argue that plant blindness is common, but not inevitable. If immersed in a plant-affiliated culture, the individual will experience language and practices that enhance capacity to detect, recall, and value plants, something less likely to occur in zoocentric societies. Therefore, conservation programs can contribute to reducing this bias. We considered strategies that might reduce this bias and encourage plant conservation behavior. Psychological research demonstrates that people are more likely to support conservation of species that have human-like characteristics and that support for conservation can be increased by encouraging people to practice empathy and anthropomorphism ofnonhuman species. We argue that support for plant conservation may be garnered through strategies that promote identification and empathy with plants. Las iniciativas de conservación de plantas se quedan atrás y reciben considerablemente menos financiamiento que los proyectos de conservación de animales. Exploramos una posible razón de esta preferencia: una tendencia entre los humanos a no tomar en cuenta ni valorar a las plantas en el ambiente. La investigación experimental y los censos han demostrado una mayor preferencia por, una memoria superior por y una mejor detección visual de los animales en comparación con las plantas. Este sesgo se ha atribuido a factores de percepción como la falta de movimiento de las plantas y la tendencia de las plantas a combinarse entre sí, pero también se atribuye a factores culturales como un mayor enfoque sobre los animales en la educación biológica formal. En contraste, la investigación etnográfica revela que muchos grupos sociales tienen lazos fuertes con las plantas, incluyendo relaciones no-jerárquicas de parentesco. Argumentamos que ignorar a las plantas es común, pero no es inevitable. Si se está inmerso en una cultura afiliada con las plantas, el individuo vivirá lenguajes y prácticas que incrementan la capacidad de detectar, recordar y valorar a las plantas, algo menos probable de ocurrir en las sociedades zoocéntricas. Por esto, los programas de conservación pueden contribuir a reducir este sesgo. Consideramos estrategias que podrían reducir este sesgo y fomentar el comportamiento de conservación de plantas. La investigación psicológica demuestra que las personas tienen mayor probabilidad de apoyar a la conservación de las especies que tienen características humanas y que el apoyo hacia la conservación puede incrementarse si se alienta a las personas a practicar la empatia y el antropomorfismo de especies -humanas. Argumentamos que el apoyo para la conservación de las plantas puede obtenerse por medio de estrategias que promuevan la identificación con y la empatia hacia las plantas.