You could look it up, part 2

 My last post was about a claim that white support for welfare state programs dropped sharply between 1960 and 1964, when the civil rights movement called for directing more of their benefits to black people.  I pointed out that there was a potentially important change in the question (from the ANES) between 1960 and 1964:

1956-1960: 
(Same introduction as in VCF0805 [CARD WITH RESPONSES SHOWN]).
'The government in Washington ought to see to it that everybody who
wants to work can find a job.'
1964,1968:
In general, some people feel that the government in Washington should
see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living.
Others think the government should just let each person get ahead on his
own.'  Have you been interested enough in this to favor one side over
the other.  (IF YES:)  Do you think that the government --

To complicate things further, the ANES has run another question starting in 1972:

Some people feel that the government in Washington should see to it
that every person has a job and a good standard of living.  (1972-
1978,1996-LATER: Suppose these people are at one end of a scale, at
point 1).  Others think the government should just let each person get
ahead on his/their own. (1972-1978,1996: Suppose these people are at
the other end, at point 7.  And, of course, some other people have
opinions somewhere in between, at pints 2,3,4,5 or 6.)
Where would you place yourself on this scale, or haven't you thought
much about this?  (7-POINT SCALE SHOWN TO R)

A few other surveys have asked each of these questions over the years, so I tried to put them all together to get a sense of change over the whole time since 1956.  

I use the log of the odds ratios of support to opposition, since the percent of don't know/middle responses varied substantially.  For the seven point question, I counted 1-3 as support and 5-7 as opposition.  

It's clear that support is higher for the first form, which doesn't mention standard of living and also says "everyone who wants to work" rather than "every person."  With that form, support was higher in the 1970s than in 1956-70 or in 2012.  Since it's been asked only once since the 1970s, we can't be too confident about changes in that period, but it clearly didn't decline after the 1950s (the 2012 estimate is slightly higher than the 1956, 1958, and 1960 estimates).  

The second and third forms show about the same level of support (oddly, the ANES codebook treats 1 and 2 as variants of the same question, and 3 as a different question).  In order to see changes in the those variables more clearly, here's the figure omitting type 1:

Two of the results are from a NORC survey from early 1974.  It seems like that survey had an unusually liberal sample--I've looked at some other questions from it, and they all seem out of line with results from most contemporaneous surveys.  If you exclude those two, there might be an upward trend--towards more support for government responsibility.  If you include them, there's no evidence of a trend.   

So overall, there are two interpretations that are consistent with the data (1) support for government action increased from the 1950s to the 1970s, and then declined, so that there's no trend over the whole period, or (2) support for government action increased from the 1950s to the 1970s and then stayed about the same or increased slightly, so that it's now higher than in the 1950s.  The one possibility we can rule out is that popular support for government action has declined since the 1950s.  

That leaves the question of how I would explain "the draining of public resources and investments" since the 1950s.  I'll take that up in my next post.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]