Public Opinion on Welfare State Recalibration: Evidence from Survey Experiments

• In Event: Voting for Welfare: New Economic Risks and Voters’ Demands for Social Policies

Abstract

A large literature on public opinion towards government spending indicates that most forms of social spending are highly popular among the wider public. More recently, the literature on the multidimensional nature of welfare politics has forcefully shown that the main line of conflict does not revolve around more or less spending per se, but rather around more fine-grained distributional issues between different welfare state orientations. Scholars have therefore started to emphasize differences in voters’ preferences between consumption- and investment-oriented social spending. The existing research on public opinion towards welfare state recalibration, however, is limited by its empirical foundation. Most research asks about attitudes towards individual social policies, but these one-dimensional questions fail to capture priorities and trade-offs inherent in the multidimensional recalibration of the welfare state. In times of austerity, governments always face trade-offs between spending in different social policy areas. In order to address this weakness of the existing literature, we use original survey experiments that measure preferences on and trade-offs between six subfields of social policy (including labor market policy, education, family policy, and pensions). The survey experiments were carried out in Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, allowing us to shed light on how citizens evaluate different forms of welfare state recalibration in different contexts. The results show that preferences change dramatically when individuals are confronted with policy trade-offs and that different variables explain attitudes towards welfare state spending than attitudes towards welfare state recalibration.

Authors

• Björn Kristen Bremer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

• Reto Bürgisser, University of Bern