Which Aspects of Welfare States Enhance the Public Good? Quality Is What Matters

• In Event: 4261 - Popular Support, Perceptions, and Political Discourse: Welfare states in cross-national comparison

Abstract

Do welfare states that spend heavily on social issues such as old age income (pensions), health, education elicit the admiration of the general public? Do publics reject the welfare state? Focusing on Europe and the US, we find that countries with higher social spending have not persuaded their publics to evaluate them highly. This does not mean that social service provision is immaterial to the wellbeing of the citizenry. Instead, our results show that that individuals' wellbeing is highly responsive to the quality of social services. Our general findings are not consistent with structuralist/materialist theory, nor with simple dominant ideology or system justification arguments, but are somewhat consistent with a legitimate framing hypothesis, with an atomistic self- interest hypothesis, and with a reference group solidarity hypothesis. We proceeded to explore a possible interaction between family income and welfare spending on subjective well being, and it turns out that for people with family incomes less than $5,000 per year, higher social spending does increase the quality of life by a moderate amount, but otherwise does not. That may explain emerging trends of resistance to some aspects of the welfare state: As family incomes continue to rise across Europe, fewer and fewer people are in the situation which benefits from spending per se. Our multilevel analyses use data from the European Quality of Life Surveys. Measurement context and supplementary analyses use data from the International Social Science Survey, Round 21.

Authors

• M.D.R. Evans, University of Nevada

• Jonathan Kelley, University of Nevada-Reno