Who Deserves Scarce Health and Education Resources? How Policy Context Shapes Target Group Deservingness

The social construction of target populations (SCTP) framework emphasizes the ways in which target populations’ levels of political power and deservingness shape the allocation of policy benefits, but less attention has been devoted to the conditions under which the same target population may be considered deserving in one policy context but undeserving in another. We argue that perceived deservingness and distributions of policy benefits to dependent groups are conditional on two components of policy context: (1) resource scarcity and (2) policy domain. We test our hypotheses in two nationally representative conjoint experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on people with disabilities (PWD), a significant and understudied marginalized group. We find that while respondents prioritized PWD when providing educational resources, they deprioritized PWD when allocating life-saving medical resources. We also find that emotions toward PWD were important correlates of public preferences for allocating policy benefits. Together, our findings highlight the importance of resource scarcity, policy domain, and emotions in shaping deservingness perceptions and the allocation of scarce resources.