The Long Shadow of Welfare Retrenchment: Intergenerational Family Transmission and Policy Feedback Effects

• In Event: Social Welfare Policy

Abstract

Welfare states have faced permanent austerity since the 1970s, driven by structural pressures including low growth, aging, and fiscal deficits (Pierson, 1994, 2001). This long-term context implies that retrenchment unfolds gradually and cumulatively across generations, with different cohorts encountering distinct rounds of welfare contraction over the life course. While Pierson’s new politics demonstrates that retrenchment generates significant political resistance and shapes citizens’ attitudes toward government, existing research has largely confined analysis to intra-generational effects, leaving the intergenerational durability of retrenchment effects underexplored.
Political socialization research provides an important basis for examining the intergenerational consequences of welfare retrenchment. It shows that political attitudes and normative orientations are often transmitted within families, as parents’ lived experiences shape the outlook of younger generations. Thus, retrenchment effects may reach beyond directly affected cohorts and endure through intergenerational transmission. Policy feedback theory helps specify the mechanism. Beyond distributive consequences, policies generate interpretive effects by conveying signals about state priorities and state–citizen relations. Svallfors (2010) further develops this insight by highlighting normative feedback, whereby institutionalized policy experiences shape citizens’ understandings of mutual rights and obligations. Welfare retrenchment therefore can also reshape normative expectations of state responsibility, with consequences that may persist across generations.
Building on this framework, the present study investigates a critical yet unexamined question: Does parental experience of welfare retrenchment shape offspring attitudes toward contemporary welfare contraction, and if so, what are the underlying mechanisms? The theoretical gap is the absence of an intergenerational perspective in both retrenchment politics and policy feedback theory.
This study uses two episodes of welfare retrenchment in China as the empirical basis to examine intergenerational feedback. Both reconfigure the state–citizen welfare relationship, albeit in different ways.The large-scale SOE layoffs of the 1990s shifted millions of urban workers from “cradle-to-grave” welfare protection to institutionalized disruption, breaking the implicit social contract of the planned economy era. By contrast, the ongoing gradual increase in the statutory retirement age recalibrates the welfare contract by extending working years and postponing pension eligibility. Together, these two policies provide a valuable empirical setting for analyzing how different forms of welfare retrenchment generate intergenerational feedback effects.
Using nationally representative survey data and regression models, the analysis examines whether parental exposure to SOE layoffs affects offspring support for raising the retirement age. The findings reveal a significant negative association: offspring whose parents experienced retrenchment express considerably lower support for the current pension reform. Historical retrenchment does not generate adaptive acceptance but rather heightens sensitivity and resistance, transmitted via normative inheritance of welfare fragility. Mediation analysis confirms that altered normative beliefs about governmental welfare responsibility constitute a key intervening mechanism.
The study makes three principal contributions. First, it extends the analysis of welfare retrenchment politics from intra- to inter-generational dynamics, broadening Pierson’s framework. Second, it advances policy feedback theory by demonstrating how interpretive effects operate across generations within the family. Third, it provides novel empirical evidence from a major institutional transformation, showing how historical policy legacies persistently shape mass political attitudes through familial transmission.

Authors

• Yue Guo, Beijing Normal University, School of Government
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Xinrui Peng, Beijing Normal University, School of Government
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jingshi Hong, Tsinghua University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Tianze Ding, Beijing Normal University, School of Government
  Presenting Author