ABSTRACT

Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account the economy itself, a substantial relationship between media tone and economic attitudes persists. Given that economic attitudes influence a wide variety of political outcomes, this finding carries important normative and political significance.

ABSTRACT

Political economists have increasingly looked to understand social welfare policy as a product of individual-level demand for social spending. This work hypothesizes that individuals with riskier jobs demand more social spending and that large welfare states emerge where there are more of such individuals. In this article we build on the “policy feedback” literature to argue that existing welfare institutions condition how individual-level factors affect social policy preferences. Specifically, we argue that institutions directly altering the risk of unemployment (employment protection legislation) and those that delink benefits from the labor market create a more uniform system of social risk that reduces the importance of individual-level risk in shaping policy preferences. We test these propositions using multilevel analysis of 19 advanced industrial countries in 2006. We find that individual risk matters for social policy preferences only where employment protection is low and welfare benefits are dependent on employment.

ABSTRACT

Using 267 repeated policy questions (962 time points), we examine gender differences in policy choices and how they have changed from the 1960s to the 1980s. The average gender difference in preferences toward policies involving the use of force have consistently been moderately large. Sex differences in opinion toward other policies—regulation and public protection, “compassion” issues, traditional values—have been approximately half as large but they also warrant more attention than in the past. Our analysis suggests that the salience of issues has increased greatly for women, and as a result differences in preferences have increased in ways consistent with the interests of women and the intentions of the women's movement.

ABSTRACT

Women’s suffrage was a major event in the history of democratization in Western Europe and elsewhere. Public choice theory predicts that the demand for publicly funded social spending is systematically higher where women have and use the right to vote. Using historical data from six Western European countries for the period 1869–1960, we provide evidence that social spending out of GDP increased by 0.6–1.2% in the short-run as a consequence of women’s suffrage, while the long-run effect is three to eight times larger. We also explore a number of other public finance implications of the gender gap.

ABSTRACT

Do economic and institutional integration lead to citizens of the advanced capitalist societies becoming more similar also in their attitudes? The received wisdom of the field implies that no convergence should be expected and that none can be found. However, recent analyses, using data from the ISSP surveys on attitudes toward the Role of Government, show substantial convergence tendencies between western countries in their citizens’ attitudes toward government responsibilities. In this chapter, we aim to further analyse and explain these convergence tendencies, using ISSP data and comparing Britain and the US as a particularly interesting pair of countries. We compare cohort and class patterns in attitudes towards income redistribution and towards unemployment policies in these two countries, in order to analyse how convergence patterns are played out in different generations and classes. We find that the convergence in attitudes cannot be attributed to cohort replacement. In fact, cohort differences in these countries are small, and tend to become even smaller over time. It is not the case that younger generations are more similar across countries, or that the gradual cohort replacement among respondents accounts for the attitudinal convergence. Changing class patterns in Britain account for some of the convergence, since the drop in support for unemployment policies seems to be particularly pronounced among workers. However, neither changing class patterns nor cohort replacement account for the substantial convergence between these two liberal welfare regimes. We discuss these findings in relation to changing patterns of risk exposure, and to different policy predicaments in Europe and the US.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the influence of three dimensions of religion—belonging (faith tradition membership), behaving (frequency of service attendance), and context (one's relationship to aggregate population characteristics)—on attitudes toward multiple forms of state-provided social protection, or welfare attitudes. To do so, this article uses data from 17 countries surveyed in the 2006 “Role of Government” wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Results from mixed effects regression show that contextual effects are highly predictive of welfare attitudes. Nations that are more religiously heterogeneous are less supportive of state protection, while nations that are more homogeneous, particularly Catholic nations, are more supportive. Results hold net of fractionalization, political institutional measures, and economic characteristics. At the individual level, all three dimensions of religiosity are predictive of welfare attitudes. These patterns suggest that in rich Western democracies, religion continues to play an important role in structuring the moral economies.

ABSTRACT

The ability of individuals to move freely from one jurisdiction to another is generally seen as a constraint on the amount of redistribution that each jurisdiction within a system of governments can undertake. In this paper, we look at this proposition by developing a positive analysis of income redistribution by local governments in a federal system. We ask how much redistribution occurs when only local governments can have tax/transfer instruments, individuals can move freely among jurisdictions, and voters in each jurisdiction are fully aware of the migration effects of redistributive policies. Local redistribution is shown to induce sorting of the population, with the poorest households located in the communities that provide the most redistribution. While the threat of out-migration affects the potential for redistribution, our results suggest that significant local redistribution is nonetheless feasible. Numerical computations indicate that the proportion of residents who are renters is a major factor affecting the local choice of level of redistribution.

ABSTRACT

This study unveils the effects of union structure – national, industrial and enterprise unionism – on the solidarity and redistribution preferences of workers. We argue that labor unions have varied scope and levels of solidarity as well as redistribution preferences because solidarity is not naturally given but tends to be cultivated by labor unions. In order to sustain commitment to egalitarian wages and redistributive social policies, a spirit of solidarity must be instilled in the minds of members, especially more privileged workers. Our analysis finds that countries with encompassing unions at national and industry levels have higher levels of overall support for government intervention to reduce income inequality than countries with enterprise unionism. It suggests that welfare state building is not just a function of relative power between labor and capital; union structure and preference formation matter as well.

ABSTRACT

The logic of self-interest suggests that most people will favor imposing heavy taxes on the rich and distributing the proceeds among the general population, but in reality this is not a popular position. A number of explanations have been suggested, but there has been little systematic research. This paper reviews a wide range of survey data with the goal of identifying more or less promising explanations. Three receive clear support: most people underestimate the earnings of those at the top, believe that the chance of earning high incomes contributes to economic growth, and have little faith in the government’s ability to redistribute wealth. One can be rejected: that people tend to overestimate their own economic standing. Others receive mixed or moderate support. The paper concludes by discussing how public opinion may help to account for national differences in the concentration of wealth and income.

ABSTRACT

This study assesses how the countries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia are attempting to utilize welfare reform to address the growing concerns around wealth inequality. Specifically, it seeks to better understand citizen support for welfare services within these two countries and how cultural aspects of these two societies have shaped the welfare reform dialogue and service planning processes. The authors used nationally representative data from Life in Transition surveys (LiTS) conducted in 2010 (N = 1,000 in Kazakhstan; N = 1,016 in Kyrgyzstan) and 2015 (N = 1,505 in Kazakhstan; N = 1,500 in Kyrgyzstan) by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. The study performs empirical testing of hypotheses of welfare support based on theories of self-interest, reciprocity, and Muslim identity. Findings indicate that: (a) the use of public services increased the support for welfare programs; (b) personal encounters with bribing reduced the support for welfare over time; and (c) the Muslim identity increased the willingness to pay more taxes among citizens for such services. Future studies should include assessing the religiousness and Zakat-related adherence of Muslim respondents.

ABSTRACT

Economic inequality is seen as fair when people believe it to be the result of fair processes, or in other words, in accordance with normative rules about resource allocation. As a result, people may support substantial inequalities of outcome as fair. There is broad agreement, within and across societies, on the normative rules that govern resource allocation. However, when people use these rules to evaluate specific instances of inequality, their conclusions are systematically affected by available information, self-interest and group-interest, and system justification. This causes divided opinions regarding the fairness of specific inequalities. Recent evidence suggests that growing economic inequality does not directly impact perceptions of fairness, but may reduce perceptions of meritocracy, thereby indirectly reducing the legitimacy of inequality.

ABSTRACT

This article argues that public opinion regarding the legitimacy of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are perceived to be high, the public thinks of larger income inequality as legitimate. The phenomenon is explained by the system justification motivation and other psychological processes that favor existing social arrangements. Three experiments show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect which income differences are thought of as legitimate. A fourth experiment shows that the system justification motivation is a cause of this effect. These results can provide an empirical basis for future studies to assume that the public reacts to inequality with adapted expectations, not increased demands for redistribution.

ABSTRACT

Scholars have shown that diversity is associated with a weaker commitment to the provision of collective goods. However, we lack evidence at the individual level that explains this pattern in the United States. In this paper I show that white individuals living in more homogenous communities are more supportive of public goods spending than those who live in more diverse communities. I use restricted access data from the General Social Survey to account for the selection problem that racially conservative people live in less diverse communities. The evidence indicates that conservative spending preferences in diverse communities are driven by reluctance among whites to support public expenditures that are perceived to benefit minorities.

ABSTRACT

This article employs multilevel modeling to assess the importance of income inequality on the demand for redistribution in a sample of 22 European countries. According to standard political economy models of redistribution – notably the Meltzer-Richard model – inequality and demand for redistribution should be positively linked. However, existing empirical research has disputed this claim. The main advantages of this article is that demand for redistribution is measured at the individual level, and that the relevant interaction between inequality and own income is considered. The main findings are that inequality is positively associated with demand for redistribution, and that the median income person is sensitive to the level of inequality. These findings are robust to the inclusion of a range of relevant control variables. The results are relevant in relation to the increase in inequalities in many European countries, and especially relevant to the current debate about the importance of directly observable differences in public preferences for social policy outcomes.

ABSTRACT

To comprehend how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to get a handle on both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives for governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To test our hypotheses, we extract detailed risk-exposure measures from labour-force surveys and marry them to cross-national opinion survey data. Results from analysis of these data attest to the great importance of risks within the labour market in shaping popular preferences for redistributive efforts by governments. In a second step, we turn our attention to the supply side of government redistribution. Institutions, we argue, mediate governments' reactions to redistributional demands following economic shocks. Using time-series cross-country data, we demonstrate how national training systems, and electoral institutions, as well as partisanship, shape government responses.

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critique and analysis of recent OECD research by Adema and Ladaique identifying the impact of taxes and private benefits on social spending. By using the techniques of multivariate modelling, we show that both gross public and net private expenditures are strongly influenced by partisan incumbency, although in opposite directions, and that the more we net out the effect of taxes, the less politics matters and the more spending is shaped by socio-economic forces. In a second stage of the analysis, we show that the crucial mechanism of welfare state redistribution is the taxation of gross social expenditure and demonstrate that this effect is almost entirely political in nature.

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how income inequality affects class differences in attitudes to redistribution. Drawing on the fourth wave (2008–09) of the European Values Study, it provides a multilevel analysis covering 44 nations. The main finding is that class differences in attitudes to redistribution tend to fade out in more unequal countries, not because higher classes converge toward more pro-redistributive positions, but because working class people become less egalitarian. This result proved to be robust with respect to several checks and to the inclusion of different control variables, both economic and non-economic. The interpretation of these puzzling findings points to the role of various societal and cultural factors, such as social mobility, political discourse and individualistic values.

ABSTRACT

Rapid technological change – the digitalization and automation of work – is challenging contemporary welfare states. Most of the existing research, however, focuses on its effect on labor market outcomes, such as employment or wage levels. In contrast, this paper studies the implications of technological change for welfare state attitudes and preferences. Compared to previous work on this topic, this paper adopts a much broader perspective regarding different kinds of social policy. Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that individual automation risk is positively associated with support for redistribution, but negatively with support for social investment policies (partly depending on the specific measure of automation risk that is used), while there is no statistically significant association with support for basic income. We also find a moderating effect of the overall size of the welfare state on the micro-level association between risk and preferences.

ABSTRACT

We empirically study how social capital influences individuals' preferences for redistribution to target groups using unique surveys of approximately 34,000 individuals across 68 Russian regions in 2007 and 2011. There is a positive relationship between social capital and support for government redistribution based on objective verifiable criteria. We interpret the results in terms of the perceived likelihood of cheating. Benefits to the ‘needy' are at greater risk of being diverted to nondeserving claimants compared to benefits for which there are objective criteria, such as merit, being retired or disabled, or having many children. Our results show that when there is higher social capital in a region, there is also less tolerance for the possibility of cheating by recipients of government income transfers.

ABSTRACT

Although preferences for redistribution have been widely studied in the economic literature, their relationship with risk preferences has received only marginal attention so far. The aim of this work is to provide evidence on this topic using a between-subject laboratory experiment and a fine grid to measure individual risk attitudes. Our findings suggest that the more the people are risk averse, the more they are in favor of redistribution across members of a society that allows upward social mobility, but it is also characterized by uncertainty about the final position in the income ladder. Our interpretation is that individuals exploit redistributive taxation as a form of insurance against uncertainty in the outcome of their effort.

ABSTRACT

Stefan Svallfors' 1997 conclusion that patterns of attitudes towards redistribution are essentially the same across welfare‐state regimes rests on a questionable treatment of missing data and on poor operationalization of the theoretical determinants of public opinion. Using demographic variables to improve the model specification, we identify cross‐country differences in the social bases of support for redistribution that confirm predictions of welfare‐state scholarship. The gap between married and unmarried people is unimportant in universalist regimes; the insider/outsider cleavage is more important in conservative and specific skills systems; class matters more in liberal regimes. We find additional cross‐national variation when we examine whether popular support for redistribution is related to beliefs about social mobility. Specifically, beliefs about why people get ahead in society are key determinants of attitudes towards redistribution in the United States and Australia, but play a more limited role in Norway and Germany.

ABSTRACT

Research either focused on self-interest or left–right ideology to explain support for demanding active labour market policies (ALMPs). This article focuses instead on how attitudes towards these policies are rooted in the underlying policy paradigm. We link attitudes towards ALMPs to two pillars of the activation paradigm: distributive justice and unemployment attributions. Structural equational modeling is employed on the Belgian National Election Study data of 2014 (N = 1901). Individuals supporting the principles of need and equity and who blame the unemployed are more in favour of demanding activation. These frameworks and hence the policy paradigm thus have substantial predictive power.

ABSTRACT

Welfare generosity is a multidimensional concept that refers to both the access to benefits and the levels of benefits (in terms of the amounts paid to recipients). However, in analyses of public support for welfare, this distinction has been largely disregarded. To gain a fuller picture of attitudes towards welfare redistribution, the current study explicitly compares the two elements and examines which distributive justice principles—that is, equality, equity, and need—are preferred to govern, on the one hand, the access to benefits and, on the other hand, their levels. The article evaluates this distinction in two different distributive contexts (pensions and unemployment benefits) and contrasts social-structural as well as ideological dividing lines. For this purpose, data from the Belgian National Elections Study 2019 are analysed. The results indicate that the access to and levels of benefits are clearly distinct dimensions in public opinion, as different justice principles are preferred for the two policy dimensions. In addition, structural equation models illustrate that the access dimension is more ideologically structured, whereas preferences regarding the levels of benefits are more strongly stratified along social-structural lines. Overall, the results imply that social justice preferences are clearly different when considering the access to benefits or their level. This distinction should be taken into account in welfare attitude research.

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of aggregate public opinion – particularly James Stimson’s measure of policy mood – have long been used to explain electoral outcomes and government responsiveness in the United States. However, we still know little about policy mood outside the US and a few Western European countries. Understanding the relationship between policy and preferences outside the pool of advanced democracies is crucial as voters outside that context are often depicted as outcome oriented; that is, they are depicted as voting based on valence issues, where there is shared agreement on the preferred outcome, instead of on a set of coherent policy preferences. We argue that this depiction of voters is attributable to the absence of data in these countries and not to the absence of coherent policy preferences. We test our argument by analyzing nearly three decades of Uruguayan public opinion data including 78 different questions administered 295 times. Our analysis shows that policy preferences across related issues in Uruguay largely move in tandem, suggesting that a coherent policy mood indeed exists. Further, we provide evidence that this policy mood is distinct from symbolic political ideology and that it responds thermostatically to changes in government. This thermostatic responsiveness suggests that Uruguayans do not merely focus on whether the economy is good or bad but, rather, update their policy preferences in response to the direction of government policy. Together, these results offer a much more nuanced depiction of public opinion outside advanced industrial democracies than previous research suggests, with important implications for democratic accountability in Latin America and other developing economies.

ABSTRACT

Abstract Although considerable evidence indicates that public preferences for income inequality and redistribution vary across socioeconomic groups (i.e., occupation and income), much less is known about the temporal dynamics of these preferences. The purpose of this study is (a) to examine whether the attitudinal distance between managerial/professional workers and unskilled manual workers has changed (converged or diverged) over time and to (b) explore the reasons for and implications of the dynamics of preferences in the past several decades. Using data from the General Social Survey 1978?2016 (23 time-points; N = 27,211), this study finds that the influence of occupational class has lost some of its significance in shaping public preferences for income inequality and that the declining effect of occupation can be explained in part by the attitudinal convergence between better- and less-educated citizens. Findings suggest that proequality coalitions across educational boundaries play a remedial role in bridging the occupational divide over government redistribution in the United States.

ABSTRACT

Migration has become an important and polarising issue on the political agenda, in particular since the migration movements to Europe in 2015. What attitudes migrants bring to the host societies is relevant for the stability of modern democracies in general and for political representation in particular. Several studies investigate differences in attitudes and preferences between migrants and non-migrants, on the one side, and within the heterogeneous group of migrants on the other. These (differences in) attitudes among migrants are often related to the dominant patterns of political attitudes in the countries of origin. We contribute new insights to this literature using novel survey data from Germany covering subsamples of respondents with an Italian, Russian and Turkish migrant background. We argue and show empirically that migrants’ positions on contentious issues like migration, the order of society, and welfare state policy are shaped not only by the cultural background of the migrant’s society of origin, but also by personal characteristics like the status of a first- or second-generation migrant and their religious orientation in terms of denomination and religiosity.

ABSTRACT

Nearly, all Americans have received social policy benefits, yet many do not acknowledge “using government social programs.” Why? Work on the submerged state proposes that people who receive social assistance through market mechanisms do not realize that the benefits they get are the result of government policy, and therefore, they do not acknowledge receiving government assistance. Others point to motivated reasoning or social desirability bias to explain the gap between acknowledging and using social programs. We classify the existing literature into three broad explanations—delivery, definition, and desirability—and propose that each may be responsible for people's inability to accurately report using government social programs. We test these mechanisms with original survey experiments. The results of this study provide support for the theory that multiple mechanisms are at work in shaping social policy acknowledgment, but they confirm that a partisan acknowledgement gap exists across a variety of conditions, and it persists despite treatments designed to minimize it. The study has significant implications for the conditions under which partisanship and policy usage coalesce to undermine support for government social expenditures, and it helps to explain the persistence of a “makers vs. takers” logic in American politics.

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a new aspect of skill profiles, ‘relational skills’, to examine how occupation-oriented relational skills can activate different perceptions of pay equity between genders and influence support for the welfare state. Relational skills refer to the degree of which a worker possesses skills pertaining to human interactions to those regarding the operation of machines or tools. We examine how relational skill ratio differently influences perceptions of justice in the pay system for men and women and how this shapes their welfare attitudes. By analyzing levels of support for redistribution in 30 OECD member countries targeted by the International Social Survey Program in 2009, we find the gender divide in social policy preferences to be the widest in high relational skill occupations. We argue that this divide is associated with the significant contrast between men and women in whether they perceive their pay to justly reflect their efforts and skills. Our findings suggest that women’s perceptions of discriminatory wage scales and support for the welfare state will be most prominent in occupations that present evaluation ambiguities or gender ascriptions that challenge women from breaking the glass ceiling.

ABSTRACT

This article presents new findings on the perception of social justice in a country comparison of Austria with its three post-socialist neighboring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The analysis considers both, changes in the structure and perception of inequality. The first part of this article deals with the historical roots of the countries during the Habsburg monarchy and continues with the different developments after World War I and II up to the present. In the second part, socio-economic trends from 1960 to 2020, and the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys 1987 to 2019 are investigated. The findings show that most of the population in all four countries thinks that income differences are too large, while judgments are also subject to dynamic change. In addition, there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves higher than people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterized by small elite, while the mass of the people belong to the bottom.

ABSTRACT

Are those things on which Americans most disagree the same things that divide liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans? How has this changed over time? To answer these questions, I use 350 subjective items from five decades of the General Social Survey. Estimating disagreement with ordinal dispersion and using a novel measure of sorting by party and ideological identification, I find an increasing positive association between the two phenomena. In the 1970s, the likelihood that opinion on contentious items divided partisans was low. Since then, this probability has increased. Disagreement has been more consistently associated with higher levels of ideological sorting, though this relationship has also strengthened since the 1980s. I then ask which items and substantive domains have propelled the politicization of disagreement. I decompose the estimated coefficients between disagreement and sorting by item to quantify their contribution in each decade. I find that opinions from two domains play a large role throughout the period: public spending, and sexuality and abortion. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of heterogeneity within domains and over time. Though disagreement between Americans has increasingly sorted, a relatively small number of items drive this relationship in any one decade. Even among voters, a good proportion of disagreement remains unrelated to ideological or partisan divisions.

ABSTRACT

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments’ stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.

ABSTRACT

Mass immigration is transforming the politics of income redistribution in European welfare states. Some scholars argue that immigration erodes public support for redistribution, while others argue it could have the opposite effect. Until now, the literature has attempted to isolate a generic role of immigration without distinguishing between different immigration categories. This article analyzes the relationship between internal European migration and public support for income redistribution in 17 Western European countries using the European Social Survey’s seven rounds (2002–2014). It finds that some forms of internal migration, namely, migration from new Central and Eastern European countries, are positively related to Western European support for income redistribution. The study also sheds light on the crucial role of the welfare state, finding that the compensation effect is stronger in countries with higher social protection. The results support group-specific understandings of the relationship between immigration and income redistribution. In sum, the relationship varies by immigrant group and depends on the generosity of social protection.

ABSTRACT

The political preferences of those with high and low incomes are highly correlated, and both groups become less supportive of redistributive spending as economic inequality increases. This article looks for a source of these interincome group correlations by examining trends in media coverage. We find that during periods of higher inequality, media coverage is more likely to focus on the personal characteristics of welfare recipients rather than the social consequences and causes of poverty. Observational and experimental data indicate that this shift in media frames can predict declining support for welfare spending, even for those with lower incomes who might benefit from redistribution. These findings help explain the reactions of the American public to rising inequality.

ABSTRACT

Does migration pose a threat to welfare state legitimacy? We address this prominent question with a multilevel analysis of novel survey data, the ‘Inequality Barometer’, which includes individual and local-level context data in Germany (6208 individuals, up to 401 local districts). Our results suggest that the public is more reluctant to support welfare where the proportion of migrants at the local level is larger. This effect even persists when welfare is directed at groups that are perceived as more deserving of welfare support (like children, sick or older individuals) and when we examine the levels of employed migrants (that pay into the welfare state). We also find that these effects are moderated by economic risk. Particularly, we find that individuals facing higher economic risk support welfare less than their counterparts when exposed to migration. Future research should expand the local-level approach and investigate the causal mechanisms that the welfare-migration nexus is based on in more detail.

ABSTRACT

Voters support less spending on means-tested entitlements when they perceive beneficiaries as lacking motivation to work and pay taxes. Yet do concerns about the motivations of “undeserving” beneficiaries also extend to universal public goods (UPGs) that are free and available to all citizens? Lower spending on UPGs poses a particular trade-off: it lessens subsidization of “unmotivated” beneficiaries, but at the expense of reducing the ideal levels of UPGs that voters personally can access. Studies suggest that individuals will sacrifice their preferred amounts of public goods when beneficiaries who do not pay taxes try to access these goods, but it is unclear whether they distinguish based on motivations. To analyze this question, we field a nationally representative survey experiment in the UK that randomly activates some respondents to think about users of the country's universal National Health Service as either “motivated” or “unmotivated” noncontributors. Although effect sizes were modest and spending preferences remained high across the board, results show that respondents support less spending on the NHS when activated to think of users as “unmotivated” noncontributors. These findings suggest how the deservingness heuristic may shape public attitudes toward government spending, regardless of whether benefits are targeted or universal.

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has created fertile ground for welfare state reform all over the world. Especially in south Europe, where the welfare state has a limited reach and depends a lot on the family for welfare provision, recent changes in cultural views of the woman’s “moral responsibility” to take on caretaking duties, as well as chronically low political trust, have changed attitudes towards the existing welfare state. Whether these attitudes are changing with the prospect of reform of such an undesirable welfare state is examined. Specifically, the effect of cultural values and willingness to pay taxes on attitudes towards a newly introduced welfare policy during COVID-19 is analyzed. A survey conducted in August and September of 2021 in Cyprus focusing on elderly care shows that the more liberal cultural values of the family model are, the more agreement there is with the continuation of the policy, while less willingness to pay taxes is associated with less agreement with its continuation. This has implications for the future of welfare state reform in southern Europe.

ABSTRACT

Individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models, yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy. This study examines how individuals form these perceptions and explores their potential impact on preferences for redistribution. A tailored household survey provides original evidence on systematic biases in individuals' evaluations of their own relative position in the income distribution. The study discusses one of the mechanisms that may generate such biases, based on the extrapolation of information from endogenous reference groups, and presents some suggestive evidence that this mechanism has significant explanatory power. The impact of these biased perceptions on attitudes toward redistributive policies is studied by means of an experimental design that was incorporated into the survey, which provided consistent information on the own-ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents. The evidence suggests that those who had overestimated their relative position and thought that they were relatively richer than they were tend to demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking.

ABSTRACT

It is a long-standing puzzle whether or not changes in economic inequality lead to changes in redistribution. However, there has been a lack of conclusive evidence about this relationship. Moreover, redistributive preferences as an intervening factor between inequality and redistribution, which are taken for granted implicitly or explicitly in redistribution theories, have been largely overlooked in the existing analyses. Besides, recent comparative studies of inequality and redistribution have started paying attention to inequality perceptions that deviate from actual inequality. Thus, this inquiry aims to reconstruct the classical redistribution theory by employing perceived inequality and preferences for redistribution and to test the reformulated redistribution hypotheses. One of the most challenging efforts for the analysis is to develop a country-level measure of perceived inequality. To this end, the Gini coefficient of perceived social position (perceived Gini) was first created by using data from 16 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP 1987 to 2014), covering 34 OECD countries. The empirical results show robust evidence that perceived inequality, not actual inequality, is significantly associated with redistributive preferences, while preferences for redistribution do not translate into any type of redistribution.

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the problem of measuring social policy preferences in a valid and reliable way. Scholars have faced a number of challenges in measuring these preferences. First, it is not clear how exactly we should conceive of this domain. Second, the literature presents contradictory findings regarding the effect of contextual factors on policy preferences. Third, abstract preferences regarding the welfare state and information about its performance can affect each other, complicating the attempt to distinguish between the two. Finally, latent manifestations of these preferences might not be equivalent across countries. We develop an approach that validly and reliably measures attitudes about the role of government in addressing inequalities in the market distribution of resources. Mixture modeling and in particular latent class analysis enables us to take advantage of information for multiple countries and survey questions while doing justice to the characteristics of the survey data. Using three waves of the International Social Survey Programme’s module on social inequality, we find that preferences towards the market and the role of government in the economy form four distinct clusters of individuals that we refer to as “moderate altruists”, “moderate egoists”, “extreme altruists”, and “extreme egoists”. These clusters tend to be homogenous with respect to both abstract notions of the role the government should play in the economy as well as about evaluations of actual performance. The exceptions are the last two survey waves, for which we find that one class exhibits a mixed profile of individuals: solidaristic with respect to some indicators, but self-interested with respect to others.

ABSTRACT

Does the organization of the assembly affect whether governments deliver policy that reflects the public's changing preferences? Cross-national analyses of public opinion and policy outputs for policies concerning welfare and immigration show that governments respond to shifts in public opinion in systems with a dominant chamber but not where bicameralism is strong. Our theory's emphasis on the distribution of power between chambers further explains differences within bicameral systems: constraints on policy change mean that responsiveness is weaker where power is equally distributed between chambers but more robust where power is concentrated in the lower house. Evidence from institutional change in Belgium, where the fourth state reform shifted power away from the senate and disproportionately toward the lower house, provides corroborating evidence that policy becomes more responsive when constitutions concentrate legislative power. This study's findings have implications for our understanding of how bicameralism matters for government responsiveness to public opinion.

ABSTRACT

This chapter attempts to assess the extent to which attitudes towards stateorganized welfare are, or are not, converging across twenty-two of the societies covered by the ISSP Role of Government modules I-IV, fielded in 1985, 1990, 1996 and 2006. The results show that public support for the welfare state is converging across societies. Attitude change is slow but can be of considerable size over time. Attitudinal convergence does not work uniformly across welfare programs. The societies experiencing increased welfare-state support over time are mainly fueled by rising popular demands for state-led income redistribution. In the societies where the welfare state has gradually lost public support, the development is primarily caused by a growing population that does not believe that unemployment policy is a vital part of state responsibility. For some welfare policies – support for the elderly and for healthcare – public support is solid and stable over time across nearly all societies. Among advanced industrial economies, attitude change is more common in societies traveling on the market-oriented liberal welfare-state path than in societies with a European type of welfare state.

ABSTRACT

Purpose Whether welfare provision should be broad-based or selectively targeted at the poor is one of the most common themes in social policy discourse. However, empirical evidence concerning people's preferences about these distributive justice principles is very limited. The current paper aims to bridge this gap, by analyzing Europeans' opinions about a hypothetical transformation of the welfare state that would provide social transfers and services only to people on low incomes. Design/methodology/approach The analysis draws on data from the 2016 European Social Survey and covers 21 countries. In order to understand what would motivate people to support the complete means testing of welfare provision, we use multilevel models with individual-level and contextual predictors. Findings The results show that the upper and middle classes are the most opposed to the idea, presumably as they would be the net losers from such a reform. Furthermore, our results indicate that more-egalitarian people show a higher level of support for means testing, even though the political left has traditionally promoted universalism. Some key characteristics of the welfare state also matter: People are more likely to endorse complete means testing in countries with less-generous provision and a higher incidence of poverty. However, the extent to which the existing welfare state relies on means testing has no influence on people's opinions about implementing a fully means-tested welfare model. Practical implications Some of the key findings are likely to be of interest to activists advocating on behalf of the poor and the socially vulnerable. Although it is generally assumed that universal provision is the best strategy to address the needs of disadvantaged people, our results suggest that from an electoral point of view, targeting within universalism may be a more appealing welfare strategy. Originality/value This paper details one of the very few studies to examine preferences for means-tested welfare provision in a comparative context. In addition, one of the contextual variables used in the analysis – the proportion of means-tested social benefits out of the total expenditure on social benefits – is unique to this study.

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Do personal experiences matter for public attitudes towards the role of the government? In the domain of healthcare, I argue that policies change the salience of personal experiences for government attitudes. Specifically, I expect that personal experiences matter less for government attitudes when healthcare is publicly financed, that is, when there is less emphasis on financing healthcare via market-based choices. Empirically, I link subjective and objective personal experiences from the International Social Survey Programme to macro-level policy indicators. The analysis provides strong support for the expectation and contributes to a growing body of literature interested in the underpinnings of government attitudes in a comparative perspective.

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Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that personal experience with public health insurance programs exerts a causal influence on attitudes toward both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. However, we argue that the conditional dynamics of these policy feedback effects differ from standard models of opinion formation and change. Specifically, we find that personal experience can shape preferences among those whose partisanship might otherwise make them resistant to elite messaging; in the case of support for health policy, we find effects of public programs are most pronounced among Republicans. In addition, we find that the effects of personal experience, unlike attempts to shape attitudes through elite political messaging, are concentrated among low-information voters who might otherwise not be attuned to the political environment.

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Although women of color share the same gender identity, their differing racial identities lead to questions about whether they might mobilize collectively over a shared political agenda. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we examine how linked fate among women of color shapes the political attitudes and policy preferences of Black women, Latinas, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women. Our expectation is that linked fate toward women of color will shape perception and preferences in three particular issue areas: policies that are intended to reduce racial inequity (e.g., police reform), perceptions of gender discrimination, and social welfare policies aimed at aiding lower income individuals. Our results strongly confirm these expectations indicating immense potential for cross-racial coalitions among women of color across issue areas.

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Unilateral power is an important source of policy change for contemporary presidents. In contrast with scholarship that examines the institutional constraints on presidents’ exercise of unilateral authority, I consider presidents’ unilateral behavior in a framework of political accountability. I argue that presidents have incentives to incorporate the public's policy priorities in their unilateral agendas. I examine this account using panel data on executive orders and public opinion across issue areas from 1954 to 2018. Across a variety of model specifications and estimation strategies, I find evidence that patterns of executive action reflect the public's policy priorities. Presidents issue greater numbers of unilateral directives on issues that gain public salience, particularly on issues that are more familiar to the public and when issuing more policy-significant directives. These findings suggest that accountability mechanisms structure how presidents exercise unilateral power and have normative implications for considering presidential unilateralism in a separation-of-powers system.

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Despite decades of European social dialogue, little is known about the social policy preferences of EU employers? organizations (EEOs). Building on the literature on industrial relations and the role of business in welfare state development, this article explores the preferences of key EEOs (BusinessEurope, SGI Europe and SMEunited) in vocational education and training (VET), active and passive labour market policies, pensions and work?family reconciliation. Software-based qualitative content analysis of 75 position papers and 19 joint declarations, triangulated with four elite semi-structured interviews, is employed to assess employers? preferences along four national and two European dimensions. Largely in line with the power resources theory, EEOs favour cost containment and social investment, by strengthening labour market flexicurity and reducing skills mismatches through VET. Conflicting logics of membership and influence guide the actions of EEOs: members are wary of legislation impinging on national social policy traditions; yet, greater European assertiveness makes lobbying efforts unavoidable.

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Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants? impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences?especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual elements that increasingly appear in media. Using a survey experiment fielded in the United Kingdom, we examined whether evidence about European Union immigrants? modestly positive economic impacts on the United Kingdom?presented either as text, with visualizations, or as an animated film?changed immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Although visual elements did not have an effect over and above text, all the informational treatments moved attitudes and preferences in positive directions, even among Leave voters. Our study brings together research on immigration public opinion and visual media and has implications for policymaking and journalism practice.

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Three reforms each appealing to a different logic of (re)distribution are strongly politicized in contemporary welfare states: means-tested benefits, demanding activation policies and basic income schemes. While the policy design of means-tested benefits relies on the distributive justice principle of need, demanding activation policies are intrinsically related to the principle of equity and basic income schemes depend on equality. Based on the moral economy and policy feedback literatures, which assume that public opinion adapts to the normative conceptions of justice encapsulated by institutions, attitudes towards these welfare reforms are expected to be grounded on these distributive logics. However, as these reforms are weakly institutionalized and their underlying principles are politically contested, the normative foundation of their public support remains unclear. This study investigates how distributive justice preferences shape support for these proposals by applying structural equation modelling on data from the CRONOS panel linked to the European Social Survey round 8 (2016/2017). Results indicate that only basic income schemes and demanding activation policies are to some extent connected to each of the justice principles. Overall, this study nevertheless indicates that the justice principles have limited explanatory power, which confirms that attitudes towards contemporary welfare reforms rely weakly on justice norms.

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This study explores the connections between partisan news exposure, affective political polarization, perceived threats from migrants, and immigrant deservingness. Data from a 2018 U.S. national survey indicate that exposure to immigration news on Fox News is associated with higher levels of polarization among Republicans and Democrats, while exposure to such content on CNN is not. Additionally, greater polarization correlates with Republicans perceiving more threats from migrants, while Democrats perceive fewer. Finally, Republicans with higher levels of polarization are more likely than polarized Democrats to believe that migrants should have specific qualifications to be considered deserving.

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What impact have the two recent economic crises had on citizens’ public policy preferences? During the Great Recession government responses focused on the adoption of strict austerity measures while during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought economic activity to a halt, have been oriented towards an unprecedented increase in the budget to immediately address collective needs. These two contexts provide an ideal setting for research on changes in public opinion at critical junctures. In this regard, the article examines the evolution of Spaniards’ public policy preferences since the onset of the 2008 recession, focusing on the period of the pandemic. To this end, attitudes towards public spending in six essential areas are analyzed, based on survey data from 2005 to 2022. The results suggest that spending preferences change significantly in these situations, at least in the short term, and that society supports increased expenditures, although it establishes priorities among public policies. Moreover, these spending priorities are found to have shifted between the Great Recession and the health crisis. Finally, it has been found that there has been some polarization along class and ideological lines.

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The Handbook examines contemporary trends and issues in the formation of families over the different stages of the life cycle and how they interact with family-oriented social policies of modern welfare states, mainly in the OECD countries of Western Europe, East Asia and the U.S. Focusing largely on family needs in the early stages of the life course, the conventional package of policies tends to emphasize programs and benefits clustered around measures to support marriage, childbearing, care, the reconciliation of employment and childcare during the preschool years. Drawing on a multidisciplinary group of experts from many countries, this book extends the conventional perspective on family policy by also looking at later phases of the family life course. In taking a life course perspective, this Handbook extends the purview to encompass the three main stages of family life. These are (1) cohabitation, marriage and starting a family; (2) the early years of parenting, care and employment, and (3) the period of transitions and later life: family breakdown and intergenerational supports across the life course.

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This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth inequality and deservingness valuations regarding the wealthy affect popular support for a personal wealth tax. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between self-interest and deservingness. Using original survey data and a vignette design, we find that subjective self-interest is more important than objective self-interest, and that providing information on aggregate wealth inequality can shift the attitudes of those who are otherwise indifferent in favour of wealth taxation. Furthermore, deservingness valuations impact support for taxation in important ways. Factors indicating meritocratic wealth accumulation reduce support, and this is especially pronounced among low-status respondents. By contrast, while non-meritocratic factors increase support for taxation, these effects are largely off-set in privileged groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that self-interest and deservingness valuations impact attitudes towards wealth taxation in opposing directions, and that providing information to those otherwise indifferent might increase redistributive preferences.

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Can experience with one set of policies result in support for a set of different, but related, policies? To show how this is possible, we develop a new dimension of policy feedback effects missing from prior studies – outcome distance. We then examine what we call a middle-distance outcome and apply this concept to the case of welfare attitudes in the United States. A novel counterfactual survey design is used to estimate the within-subject effects of experience with pandemic-related relief efforts (that is, stimulus checks, unemployment assistance) on attitudes towards broader welfare programmes like TANF, SNAP, SSI and Medicaid. The evidence suggests that attitudes towards broader welfare initiatives may have become more supportive as a result of the pandemic and associated policies, implying that specific policies and events can have feedback effects on outcomes that are some medium-distance away, such as other policies of a similar type. Future research ought to further explore this proposed dimension of feedback effects.

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This paper explores different ways to operationalise properties of the welfare state as explanatory variable in multilevel frameworks. Based on the observation that many common applications of welfare state measurements as independent macro-level variables lack standardised proceeding, differences between commonly used approaches (single indicators, regime typologies, and composite indices) are examined concerning their consequences for empirical results and their comparability. Each approach is first discussed regarding conceptual premises and practical applications in the literature. In a second step, differences are demonstrated empirically by performing several multilevel analyses using welfare attitudes as an exemplary dependent variable. The comparison shows that even slight differences in the operationalisation have an impact on the results and their explanatory contribution. Based on this, the paper offers possible points of departure for the development of more fitting operationalisations for the specific use as explanatory instruments. This includes criteria a measurement should meet and a stronger focus on capturing the relevant causal mechanisms assumed to be at work. The aim of this paper is thus twofold. On the one hand, it provides an overview of existing strategies and raises awareness to critical issues. On the other hand, it gives some initial pointers for a conceptual debate about how to turn characteristics of the welfare state into macro-level indicators, which can serve as independent variable.

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Two contrasting perspectives can be identified in the current literature on the relationship between European integration and the welfare state. On the one hand, the race to the bottom thesis presumes that welfare spending will be reduced to the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, the upward convergence thesis suggests that European integration supports and strengthens the capacities of national welfare states. This suggests that the consequences of European integration for national social protection systems are ambiguous. The current study contributes to this debate, by investigating the relationship between European integration and the welfare state from the perspective of public opinion. Do European citizens envision a race to the bottom or an upward convergence in social protection, and why so? Analysing data from the European Social Survey in 18 EU countries, the article reveals that the material benefits brought by national and supranational institutions, jointly shape citizens' expectations about the EU–welfare nexus, although in opposite directions. Generous national welfare provision fuels expectations that European integration fosters a race to the bottom for social protection levels, while higher receipts from EU Structural Fund programs and individual trust in EU institutions raise expectations of the EU as a catalyst of upward convergence in social standards. The implications of these findings for social policymaking in multilevel governance regimes are discussed.

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Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a large number of arguments that deploy a set of rhetorical elements to argue for and against proposals across a range of UK political issues. We find modest differences in the average effectiveness of rhetorical elements shared by many arguments, but also large variation in the persuasiveness of arguments of the same rhetorical type across issues. In addition to revealing that some argument-types are more effective than others in shaping public opinion, these results have important implications for the interpretation of survey-experimental studies in the field of political communication.

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This article studies the effect of labour unions on policy-making in six different parts of the welfare state (passive and active labour market policy, employment protection, old-age pensions, health care and education) in OECD countries after 1980 with a two-level strategy: At the micro-level, we investigate union members’ preferences. Ordered logit regression analyses indicate that union members favour generous social policies more strongly than non-members. Moreover, this effect is stronger for programmes closely related to the labour market than for programmes without a strong labour market link. At the macro-level, we investigate the conditional effect of unions on left parties expecting the former to push the left towards more generous labour market-related (but not towards less-labour market-related) programmes. Regression analyses essentially provide evidence for such a relationship. Overall, unions have been powerful in promoting their members’ social policy preferences via left parties in government but their power is recently vanishing.

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This paper discusses why and how public attitudes should matter in regulating asylum and refugee protection in rich democracies, with a focus on Europe. Taking a realistic approach, I argue that public views constitute a soft feasibility constraint on effective and sustainable policies towards asylum seekers and refugees, and that a failure to take seriously and understand the attitudes of the host country’s population can have a very damaging effect on refugee protection and migrants’ rights in practice. Bringing together insights from political philosophy, the politics of asylum, and research on public attitudes, I develop my argument by discussing why ‘what the people think’ should matter in asylum and refugee polices; how public views can and should matter given the well-known challenges with measuring attitudes and policy preferences; and what the prevailing public views might mean for the reform of asylum and refugee policies in Europe.

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In the politics of welfare, citizens often prioritize natives over immigrants. What conditions reduce welfare discrimination against immigrants? Original survey experiments from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy reveal that the divide between natives and immigrants remains the fundamental cleavage in the politics of welfare. All immigrants face welfare penalties, including immigrants from Western countries. Even young, progressive, highly educated, and economically secure native citizens strongly penalize immigrants. Although immigrants never fully overcome identity barriers, the welfare support gap between natives and immigrants decreases when immigrants have a long work history. A history of employment provides evidence of reciprocity through past contributions and signals immigrants’ commitment to the community. Other immigrants’ characteristics, such as higher education and proactive work attitude, fail to decrease the gap. This article contributes to the study of solidarity in diverse societies and the impact of immigration on the welfare state.

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How does the structure of social policy institutions shape the level of public support for the welfare state? The policy feedback literature predicts that highly inclusive welfare institutions generate larger bases of public support by shifting the focus away from redistribution and toward common market insecurities felt across classes, while more selective strategies erode support by highlighting the conflicts of interest imbedded in clearly redistributive social programs. This paper expands on existing research by adopting a disaggregated approach to measuring both welfare state structure and public support, uncovering important cross-program variations in public attitudes and welfare state design masked by traditional measures of universality and public support. This project applies this method to public opinion data in 17 advanced capitalist democracies across three policy areas: healthcare, pensions, and unemployment. The findings offer evidence of policy feedback effects.

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Workplace automation fueled by technological innovations has been generating social policy implications. Defying the prevalent argument that automation risk triggers employment insecurity and prompts individuals to favour redistribution, this study doesn’t find empirical evidence in the Chinese context. Analysing national survey data, this study reveals a very strong association between automation risk and popular preference for government responsibility in old-age support. Further analysis suggests that more generous local welfare systems generate a reinforcing effect between automation risk and individuals’ support for government involvement in old-age support. In a welfare system in which major redistributive policies are not employment-dependent, automation risk may not necessarily trigger stronger preferences for short-term immediate protection through redistributive programmes, but may stimulate individuals to project their need for social protection towards middle- or longer-term and employment-related policies. The generosity of subnational welfare systems moderates the formation of individuals’ social policy preferences through policy feedback.

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The conservative asymmetry of elite polarization represents a significant puzzle. We argue that politicians can maintain systematic misperceptions of constituency opinion that may contribute to breakdowns in dyadic representation. We demonstrate this argument with original surveys of 3,765 politicians’ perceptions of constituency opinion on nine issues. In 2012 and 2014, state legislative politicians from both parties dramatically overestimated their constituents’ support for conservative policies on these issues, a pattern consistent across methods, districts, and states. Republicans drive much of this overestimation. Exploiting responses from politicians in the same district, we confirm these partisan differences within individual districts. Further evidence suggests that this overestimation may arise due to biases in who contacts politicians, as in recent years Republican citizens have been especially likely to contact legislators, especially fellow Republicans. Our findings suggest that a novel force can operate in elections and in legislatures: Politicians can systematically misperceive what their constituents want.

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This study examines the attitudes of American foreign policy officials toward (1) the public's sophistication on matters of foreign policy, and (2) the degree of input the public should have into policy and the appropriate level of policy responsiveness. It finds officials to be marginally more positive about the public's sophistication than has previously been thought, but finds a major difference (increase) in the degree of input that officials feel the public should have into the policy process. The result of these sets of attitudes is a form of responsiveness whereby officials factor public opinion into decisions, but then attempt to change public opinion (by “educating” the public) if opposition to a decision subsequently emerges.

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In the Post-industrial Era, there has been an apparent weakening of the relationship between class and voting in the U.S., with lower class voters becoming less likely to support the Democratic Party. We argue that this reflects that lower class status predicts liberal economic attitudes, but conservative views on cultural and racial issues, while the parties are consistently liberal or conservative, creating conflicts for many voters. How do voters settle such internal conflicts? We argue that the salience that voters attach to these different types of issues determines how policy attitudes, and indirectly class, shapes voting. Using ANES and GSS data since the 1970s, we find that class consistently predicts economic and cultural/minority policy attitudes, and that lower class voters who place more salience on economic issues, and upper class voters for whom cultural issues are more salient, are more likely to support the Democratic Party in presidential elections.

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This study aims to elucidate the structure of support for social policies (redistribution and free competition), focusing on the role of community interests (especially demographic decline). To this end, Japan was selected as a case study because it has the highest proportion of the elderly population in the world. The author analyzed data from the National Survey of Social Stratification and Social Mobility in 2015 and the Population Census for the same year, employing ordered logit models. The results revealed that people living in demographically declining communities were more likely to support redistribution and less likely to endorse free competition, compared to individuals from other communities. Furthermore, compared to the underprivileged, wealthy individuals were more likely to consider community interests irrespective of individual benefits. This finding demonstrates that community interests may have a significant influence on individuals’ policy preferences.

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Who do legislators best represent? This paper addresses this question by investigating the degree of ideological congruence between senators and constituents on a unified scale. Specifically, I measure congruence between legislators and four constituent subsets—donors, co-partisans, supporters, and registered voters. To estimate the preferences of these groups, I use a large survey of voters and an original survey of campaign contributors that samples both in- and out-of-state contributors in the 2012 election cycle. I find that senators’ preferences reflect the preferences of the average donor better than any other group. Senators from both parties are slightly more ideologically extreme than the average co-partisan in their state and those who voted for them in 2012. Finally, senators’ preferences diverge dramatically from the preference of the average voter in their state. The degree of divergence is nearly as large as if voters were randomly assigned to a senator. These results show that in the case of the Senate, there is a dearth of congruence between constituents and senators—unless these constituents are those who write checks and attend fund-raisers.

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There has been an impressive stride in the research on policy feedback effects on mass publics over recent years. However, we lack systematic evidence on how large such policy feedback effects are in the literature. This article provides a review of 65 published studies and quantifies the findings and key themes in the policy feedback literature. The results show a great degree of heterogeneity in the domains and outcomes being studied and in the effects of policies on the public. In line with the findings from narrative reviews, feedback effects are greater for outcomes related to political participation and engagement. Last, the review sheds light on important theoretical and methodological limitations to be addressed in future research.

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There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results show that grassroots lobbying by e-mail has a substantial influence on legislative voting behavior. The article concludes with a number of possible extensions of the study's design to other forms of lobbying and other problems in political science.

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Abstract. This research examines individual and corporate income tax rates in order to identify the political and economic conditions that affect the rate of r

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Through an analysis of the 2004 through 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), this article demonstrates that the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) decreased support for spending on health among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, contrary to the conjecture that a rigid partisanship equilibrium has taken hold among voters in the United States. Instead, only a partisan deflection is present, with spending preferences declining more for Republicans than for Democrats, and with Independents in between. Through supplemental analysis of the GSS panel data, as well as comparative analysis of other GSS items on national spending preferences, government responsibility, and confidence in leaders, this article also undermines support for an alternative explanation that cannot be entirely eliminated from plausibility, which is that the identified period effect that emerged in 2010 and persisted through 2014 is a response to the Great Recession and resulting deficit spending by the federal government. Implications for public opinion research are discussed, lending support to current models of thermostat effects and policy-specific political mood from the political science literature, which are informed by an older literature on weather fronts in public opinion that originated in the sociology literature.

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We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on US income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only slightly moves tax and transfer policy preferences. An exception is the estate tax—informing respondents of the small share of decedents who pay it doubles support for it. The small effects for all other policies can be partially explained by respondents' low trust in government and a disconnect between concerns about social issues and the public policies meant to address them. (JEL D31, D72, H23, H24)

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Abstract. The literature on welfare state legitimacy generally views economic egalitarianism and support for the welfare state as closely related phenomena tha

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Do partisans respond differently to changes in public policy depending on which party controls the government? It is well established that opinions of various groups tend to move in parallel over time; however, work on partisanship shows that partisans can respond very differently to the same message. This study investigates whether partisans from different parties react the same to changes in policy (as implied by the parallel-publics literature), or differently (as implied by the partisanship literature). I argue that we should see important differences in policy feedback between partisan groups, but only on salient policies that have large disagreement across partisan lines. To test this expectation, I use the thermostatic model of opinion-policy feedback, relying on data from the 1973–2014 General Social Survey. Findings indicate that partisans react differently to policy in issue areas with relatively large disagreement. This finding enhances our understanding of the interaction between partisan control of government and partisanship in the opinion-policy process. Implications of these findings for research on public opinion and public policy are discussed.

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Research from the United States and Europe suggests that affluent citizens enjoy considerably more policy influence than do average citizens and the poor. I examine the extent of unequal policy responsiveness in one of the countries that have gone farthest in reducing economic inequality and restricting money in politics: Norway. I use an original dataset on public opinion and public policy containing 603 specific issues over five decades (1966–2014). The results show that although policy is certainly skewed toward the preferences of the privileged, Norway stands out among previously studied cases for two reasons: (1) The preferences of the poor seem to have some sway on economic issues and (2) not all affluent citizens get their way: educational attainment appears to be the more important determinant. The Norwegian case suggests that influence need not be as dependent upon affluence as in the United States.

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This study explores the roots and details of the Russian population’s demand for broad state interventions in three areas: labour market, social investment, and material support. Demands in labour market policy are the most frequent among the Russian population and stem from the need to eliminate inequalities in access to ‘good’ jobs and ensure fair remuneration of skilled labour. In Russia, unlike in Europe, needs in social investment policy do not stem from individualistic interests and the imperative to compensate for market failure. Instead, they result from state failure, leading in particular to growing inequality of life chances in healthcare and worsening health of the broader society. These impacts are perceived as a fundamental adverse effect of unsuccessful social policy changes, and this type of demand for state support is growing alongside household income. At the same time, wealthy Russians also hardly believe in state efficiency in the labour market, show less demand for employment policy interventions, and generally prefer ‘state escapism’. The study argues that an individualistic mindset per se is a cornerstone of the absence of request for state support in any form. These findings support the concept of bottom-up sociocultural modernisation while helping explain state escapism in post-communist welfare regimes. In general, the study provides empirical contributions to the literature on diversity of statist expectations in post-communist welfare regimes.

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Contested elections are usually seen as precondition for constituent responsiveness. By contrast, I show that even uncontested elections can create incentives for autocratic regimes to address citizen demands. I propose that closed autocracies engage in cycles of responsiveness before uncontested elections to assure citizens of their competence and raise popular support. They do so to mitigate the short-term destabilizing effects of elections. Analyzing a unique dataset of petitions to the government of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), I calculate that response times to petitions were up to 31% shorter before the GDR’s uncontested elections. Moreover, I introduce the concept of “substantive responsiveness,” which focuses on the material consequences of responsiveness for petitioners, and show that petitions were 64% more likely to be successful. The paper advances our understanding of electoral mobilization in closed regimes and contributes to an emerging research agenda on responsiveness and accountability in autocracies.

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How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals’ own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms—what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what—from adherence to those norms. We find that a nontrivial portion of those reporting ideologically inconsistent preferences do so knowingly, suggesting their lack of ideological constraint can be attributed to pragmatism rather than innocence. Additionally, a question order experiment reveals that priming ideological norms before measuring policy preferences promotes ideological adherence, suggesting ideological constraint is at least partially attributable to norm-conformity pressure. Together, these findings raise the question whether ideology is actually desirable or if it instead allows elites to reverse the direction of accountability.

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Consumer behavior and sociological research have recognized early on the negative externalities of exposure to conspicuous consumption: anxiety, debt and wasteful consumption. This article contributes to political economy by incorporating the costs of exposure to wealth-signaling consumption into the materialist self-interest model of social policy preferences. The argument is that exposure to conspicuous consumption reduces support for social spending and increases demand for lower income taxes. Tax cuts impact purchasing power directly, allowing individuals to keep up with consumption standards and to avoid looking poor by comparison. Two USA-based analyses using fine-grained data on consumption and individual attitudes at the zip code and county level support the argument. Importantly, less-affluent citizens are more likely to prioritize cuts to social spending over tax increases, at higher levels of conspicuous consumption. Additional analyses rule out alternative explanations like upward mobility prospects, local wealth effects and partisan context.

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Abstract The neoliberal structural adjustment policies in Turkey moved on to a new phase with the Health Transformation Program (HTP) that came into effect in 2003. In this study, 5,002 people, who used the services of the public hospitals in Istanbul, participated in a face-to-face survey to find out the impact of the HTP on the public's understanding of the welfare state and also the impact on their opinions over the healthcare services offered by the state. The data were classified into two topics: First, the transformation of the welfare state and second, the adequacy of the public healthcare services. Interestingly, the participants took a much more explicit stance against the neoliberal transformation of the welfare state than against the adequacy of the public healthcare service provision. The primary purpose of this research was to expose this paradox.

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The literature on immigration and the welfare state describes a trade-off between immigration and welfare support. We argue for a more nuanced view of welfare chauvinism that accounts for different motivational channels, specific welfare programs and particular population subgroups. First, we identify two separate characteristics of hostility towards immigrants that trigger welfare chauvinism: affective anti-migration sentiment that combines economic and cultural motives; and a ‘putative rational anti-migration sentiment’ that is driven by the fear that immigration could overburden the welfare state although immigrants themselves are not disliked or even appreciated. Second, running a program-specific analysis, we find that affective and ‘putative rational’ opposition to migration lower redistributive preferences towards the unemployed. On the contrary, affective anti-immigration sentiment even increases welfare affinity towards the elderly. We interpret this finding not as preferences for or against a specific welfare program but as implicit sympathy or antipathy for its recipients. Third, investigating the role of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) as the main source of welfare chauvinism, we find that PRRP supporters strongly prefer more redistribution towards a perceived native in-group: the elderly.

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The spillover of racism towards welfare opinions has previously been studied in several countries. This paper analyses how racism and welfare are formed intertwined in Austria. This remains an important topic, as the welfare state not only distributes material resources but is also seen as a site of socialization – at least within the German-speaking literature. Besides identifying a potential spillover effect within survey data for Austria, the article also discusses how the topics of the racialized, especially in the form of the migrant “other” and welfare state and support, are rhetorically linked within newspaper articles. Four rhetorical strategies are distinguished within the empirical material using the notion of the undeserving “other” to argue, among others, for general welfare state cutbacks. These strategies also introduce arguments for extreme cases of social exclusion within the welfare state that affect existing views on, and possibly also, society and social life itself.

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A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in the midst of an information revolution, this is no longer a satisfactory approach. This book explores, theoretically and empirically, the consequences of 'big data' for the politics of social protection. Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm argue that more and better data polarize preferences over public insurance and often segment social insurance into smaller, more homogenous, and less redistributive pools, using cases studies of health and unemployment insurance and statistical analyses of life insurance, credit markets, and public opinion.

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In times of emergent emphases on how climate change will affect welfare societies, welfare policies and individuals’ welfare and vice versa, this study investigates public support for welfare and environmental policies and concerns. Since previous research and literature have pointed towards a socioeconomic divide between the welfare agenda and the environmental agenda in terms of public support, this article makes a thorough socioeconomic analysis of public welfare and environmental attitudes. The article analyses data from an original study in the context of Sweden (n = 1529). Through multinomial logistic regression analysis this study investigates if and which socioeconomic factors increase the likelihood of expressing mutual support for welfare and environmental policies and concerns compared to expressing support for welfare or environmental policies and concerns in isolation, as well as no support at all. The results indicate that both low and high socioeconomic status factors increase the likelihood of expressing mutual welfare and environmental support. These factors are low - to middle-range income levels, high educational attainment and low - to high-status occupations. Accordingly, this study finds that individuals expressing mutual welfare and environmental support are less easily placed in the low to high socioeconomic continuum. This suggests that we need to go beyond the two established theoretical perspectives of self-interest and personal capabilities when explaining mutual welfare and environmental support and, for example, direct the attention to factors and theoretical points of departure that take post-materialism and non-economic dimensions into account.

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Social networking services have been placed where people share opinions and information about various topics. These services allow users to express their opinions in direct (e.g., writing a comment or reply) and indirect ways (e.g., clicking a Like button). Based on commending, replying, and liking activities, users construct majority opinions in online environments. Previous studies examined perceptual and behavioral characteristics in the circumstance of majority opinions but only few of them provided how they differ depending on content types. Based on three different types of YouTube channels (news, documentary, and comedy), this study addresses how statistical properties of user opinions and majority opinions in online environments are presented differently depending on types of content. Based on the results of statistical analyses, we provide detailed properties of user activities in three types of YouTube channels and discuss several theoretical and practical implications.

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Political debates about immigration provoke strong nationalistic pushback from citizens, constraining the policymaking capacity of states. This paper investigates to what extent labour market policies shape economically motivated preferential divides among European citizens. On the one hand, I concentrate on prospective job loss threats indicative of economic grievances and assess the impact of unemployment risk exposure on immigration policy attitudes. On the other hand, as the original contribution of the paper, I contend that, if such an economically motivated explanation holds, this relationship should vary based on the labour market institutions in each country. Multi-level analyses of 16 European countries over a decade since 2002 reveal a remarkably robust relationship between unemployment risks and more restrictive immigration policy attitudes. Importantly, more protective employment regulations seem to have a dampening effect on the impact of job loss threats on immigration policy attitudes. Conversely, there are larger attitudinal divides between the risk-exposed and the more secure workers in countries with generous and expansive unemployment compensation policies. Overall, the paper helps explain the cross-national variation in economically motivated cleavages about immigration policy attitudes in Europe.

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Technology is expected to displace many workers in the future. The public generally supports government assistance for workers viewed as less responsible for their unemployment; thus, we ask whether individuals who lose their jobs to technology are perceived as less at fault and more deserving of government benefits, compared to those who lose their jobs to other workers. We conducted a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample in the United States, randomizing whether a hypothetical worker was replaced by technology, a foreign worker, or domestic worker, and asked questions about fault perception and support for unemployment benefits. We find that workers who lose jobs to technology (or foreign workers) are viewed as less at fault than those who lose jobs to domestic workers, and that fault attribution mediated support for unemployment benefits.

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Does culture shape the demand for social insurance against risks to health and work? We study this issue across language groups in Switzerland where a language border sharply separates social groups at identical actual levels of publicly provided social insurance. We find substantially stronger support for expansions of social insurance among residents of French, Italian or Romansh-speaking language border municipalities compared with their German-speaking neighbours in adjacent municipalities. Informal insurance does not vary enough to explain stark differences in social insurance but differences in ideology and segmented media markets potentially contribute to the discrepancy in demand for social insurance.

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Public attitudes regarding privatization are important for both political and normative reasons. Past studies of public opinion on privatization have shown how socio-economic variables and ideology shape public views. In this study, we focus on a relatively under-researched factor: identity as it relates to actor preference formation. We explore attitudes toward different privatization types in a society, in which the main political fault lines are not economic, but identity-based: primarily predicated on ethnic group membership and religiosity. Based on a random sample of 1142 Israeli adults, we find that unlike most other countries, identity variables matter more than Socio-Economic Status (SES) in this type of society despite the fact that privatization is primarily perceived as an economic policy. While high levels of religiosity are associated with support for privatization, membership in an ethnic minority, in contrast, is related to negative attitudes. The contrast between the relatively favourable views of ultra-orthodox Jews to the negative ones of Arabs suggests that identity group attitudes toward neoliberal policies cannot simply be explained by SES. Moreover, not only does identity matter for shaping views on public policy, but also the particular specifics of a given identity.

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How do the labor market risks associated with technological change affect policy preferences? We argue that higher perceptions of technology-related risks should increase support for compensation and decrease support for social investment. We expect the opposite effect for individuals who use technology constantly at work, have a university degree and earn higher incomes. However, as the perception of technology-related employment risks in the latter group of individuals increases, so does their preference for compensatory and protective policy solutions to technological change. Our expectations are confirmed by novel data from a survey of 24 diverse Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that includes specifically designed questions on technology-related risks and policy preferences. The results suggest that technology-related risks not only correlate with certain demographic and occupational characteristics, but also cross-cut them. Thus, technology-related risks might not only become a source of new cleavages between the losers and winners of technological change, but also the basis for new cross-class coalitions.

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How does trade openness affect individuals’ social policy preferences in emerging markets? Drawing upon the theories of economic openness, risk, and social policy preference, we examine how trade openness and job sectors jointly shape preferences on social protection in China, the largest emerging market. Using the World Value Survey (WVS) Wave VI and archival macroeconomic indicators in 2012, we find that trade openness is associated with higher demands for government responsibility in social protection. We also find, compared with public-sector employees, private-sector employees exhibit lower levels of support to the role of government in social protection. The public–private divide in policy preferences, nevertheless, diminishes in regions with high levels of trade openness. This research provides new evidence to the risk-model of social policy preferences in the Chinese context. It also highlights the importance of considering the significant differences between public and private-sector employees in their social policy preferences.

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Stagnating incomes have been a widespread concern in advanced democracies over the past decades. However, despite a turn towards dynamic frameworks, the consequences of stagnation on political support for the welfare state are still unclear. This study introduces the distinction between “absolute” and “relative” income stagnation – that is, experiencing stagnating incomes over time (without reference to other groups) and in relative comparison to other groups – and explores how they shape citizens’ attitudes towards redistribution. I argue that absolute and relative stagnation have opposite effects on redistributive preferences. Contrary to political economy theories, I expect that low absolute income growth reduces demand for redistribution, because it reduces voters’ ability and willingness to afford welfare state policies. Support for this hypothesis is provided in an empirical analysis that combines novel estimates for absolute and relative income stagnation with longitudinal survey data on redistribution preferences in 14 advanced democracies between 1985 and 2018. The distinction between absolute and relative experiences has broader implications for comparative politics research and might contribute to explain why income stagnation and rising inequality have not led to higher political demand for redistributive welfare policy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

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We provide a model of product-based cultural change where trade integration leads to cultural convergence. A standard trade model of Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition is coupled with a micro-founded model of cultural dynamics. We show that access to varieties that are attached to a global cultural type changes the incentives of parents to socialize their children and transmit their type. The resulting increase in agents of the global cultural type leads to a magnification of the initial shock. A striking feature of the model is that even temporary shocks to openness may have permanent effects through the changing distribution of preferences in the economy.

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A growing body of research analyses public support for distributive justice principles (e.g., Aalberg, 2003; D’Anjou, Steijn, & Van Aarsen, 1995; Reeskens & van Oorschot, 2013), usually distinguishing the principles of equality, equity, and need (Deutsch, 1975; Rawls, 1972). Although the equality principle states that everybody should have the same access to certain resources, equity emphasizes the importance of distribution on the basis of proportionality and individual responsibility, and need encompasses a selective concern for those who are highest in need.Empirically investigating public opinion towards distributive justice requires adequate measurement instruments. Although several surveys operationalize preferences for the distributive principles, the indicators used are often single items (e.g., Aalberg, 2003; Arts & Gelissen, 2001) that regularly only indirectly tap into the principles (e.g., Reeskens & van Oorschot, 2013). Moreover, existing measurements scales are usually designed to measure only one or two principles (e.g. D’Anjou et al., 1995; Davey, Bobocel, Hing, & Zanna, 1999) or incorporate preferences for multiple principles such as equality and need within one latent scale (e.g., Rasinski, 1987; Wegener & Liebig, 1995). In response to this lack of agreed-upon instruments, Hülle, Liebig, and May (2017) developed the Basic Social Justice Orientations (BSJO) scale that measures preferences for equality, equity, and need, and additionally includes the distributive principle of entitlement (which emphasizes ascribed social status as a basis for distribution; Miller, 1999). Hülle et al. (2017, p. 686) validate the BSJO scale in three German surveys and conclude that the scale is “an appropriately validated instrument for measuring preferences for the four basic justice principles.”

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Despite recent attention to the economic and political consequences of automation and technological change for workers, we lack data about concerns and policy preferences about this structural change. We present hypotheses about the relationships among automation risk, subjective concerns about technology, and policy preferences. We distinguish between preferences for compensatory policies versus “protectionist” policies to prevent such technological change. Using original survey data from Spain that captures multiple measures of automation risk, we find that most workers believe that the impact of new technologies in the workplace is positive, but there is a concerned minority. Technological concern varies with objective vulnerability, as workers at higher risk of technological displacement are more likely to negatively view technology. Both correlational and experimental analyses indicate little evidence that workers at risk or technologically concerned are more likely to demand compensation. Instead, workers concerned about technological displacement prefer policies to slow down technological change.

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Research on public opinion regarding government’s role in health care has paid little attention to how public opinion has changed among different age groups over time and to how the intersection of age, birth year, political affiliation, and historical time shape public opinion. In this article, the authors ask, Who supports governmental spending on health care, and how has this changed over time? The authors propose a life-course perspective to study political polarization in the health care domain using General Social Survey 1984 to 2016 data. The results indicate that the growing political polarization in support for government intervention in health care across the 32 years studied occurred among middle-aged adults. The findings of this study contribute new understandings of how age and party membership interact in contributing to political polarization regarding government’s role in health care over time.

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Neo-liberal ideas exert increasing influence on welfare state policies in Europe. Neo-liberalism values individual interaction in free markets. It argues for welfare state cutbacks and greater individual responsibility and stresses the importance of opportunity. This in turn underscores particular themes in public attitudes (deservingness, obligation and choice) and downplays others (solidarity and community).This chapter reviews the background theoretical, policy and public attitude literature, analyses the findings of our Democratic Forums and shows how they contribute to understanding popular framings of individualism. We identify two dominant framings in different countries. One puts the emphasis on individual responsibility. It is most prominent in the denigration of unemployed people as workshy, notably in the UK and to some extent Germany, but conflicts with the widespread positive valuing of collective healthcare, pensions and education. The second more positive approach, found in all five countries, supports state investment in training, childcare and other services to mobilise workers and expand the range of opportunities to which people may aspire.

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This study addresses how political attitudes are shaped across national contexts. It does so by investigating the influence of nation-specific political articulation and framing on the relationship between human values and political attitudes. Based on the literature, two attitude dimensions can be identified. First, the socioeconomic dimension captures the tension between economic equality and equity (rewarding achievements and effort). Second, the sociocultural dimension captures the tension between individual/civil liberties and traditions/conservative norms. Very few comparative studies systematically investigate the influence of a coherent structure of more basic and abstract motivations (values) on political attitudes. We fill this gap by examining the influence of basic human values on the socioeconomic and sociocultural attitude dimensions across national contexts. To investigate the impact of human values and political attitudes, individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS 2008) from 2008 are analyzed using multi-group structural equation modeling (MGSEM). Moreover, we also explore political discourse as a key contextual factor at the country level modifying the relationships between values and attitudes. Specifically, we use data from the Comparative Manifesto Project to investigate the moderating influence of political articulation, i.e., the articulation of socioeconomic and sociocultural issues in political party manifestos, on the relationship between values and political attitudes across countries. Results indicate substantial cross-national variation in the link between values and sociopolitical attitudes, and that this variation can be partly explained by the articulation of sociopolitical issues.

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It is still debated whether people are driven by self-interest or ideological motives when judging redistributive policies of the welfare state. Drawing on personality research, we suggest that both material and ideational factors matter but not for the same kinds of individuals. Specifically, we theorize that the Big Five personality trait openness to experience increases the weight put on general ideological principles and reduces the importance of private economic concerns, as this trait is related to creative and philosophical thinking and uncertainty tolerance. To test this proposition, we use Danish survey panel data linked to registry data on income. Consistent with the argument, we find that higher openness promotes an ideological evaluation of income redistribution and depresses the influence of material self-interest as measured by income. Among open individuals, attitudes toward redistribution reflect left–right positions but are unrelated to personal income fluctuations. People who are close-minded, on the other hand, are less likely to be ideological and do base their support for redistribution on whether their income is rising or falling. Similar, although not identical, results are obtained using U.S. data. The findings have implications for our understanding of citizens’ motivations to support welfare policies and political opinion formation more broadly.

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We endow individuals who differ in skills and tastes for working, with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive (i.e., when there is a reluctance to redistribute from the hard-working to the lazy), we show that lower levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium. We provide empirical evidence that preferences for redistribution are not purely selfish, and that desert-sensitive motivations play a significant role. We estimate that preferences for redistribution are significantly more desert-sensitive in the US than in Europe.

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Against the current consensus among comparative political economists, we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it is the structure of inequality, not the level of inequality, that matters. Our theory posits that middle-income voters will be inclined to ally with low-income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich. We test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution. In addition, we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle-income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew.

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This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General Social Survey, and for a large set of countries, using the World Values Survey. The paper reviews previously found results and provides several new ones. We emphasize, in particular, the role of historical experiences, cultural factors and personal history as determinants of preferences for equality or tolerance for inequality. JEL codes are: H10, Z1

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This article develops a simultaneous equation model of the voting decision in a form thought to mirror the main lines of cognitive decision-making processes of individual voters. The model goes beyond earlier efforts in two respects. First, it explicitly represents the causal interdependence of voter assessments in the election situation, permitting such estimations as the degree to which correlations between voter issue positions and issue positions ascribed to preferred candidates arise because of projection onto the candidate or persuasion by the candidate. Secondly, the model is truly dynamic, in the sense that it is dependent on longitudinal data for its proper estimation. The utility of the model is certified by the goodness of fit achieved when applied to 1972-76 panel data for a sample of the national electorate. CR - Copyright © 1979 American Political Science Association

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The importance of social trust has become widely accepted in the social sciences. A number of explanations have been put forward for the stark variation in social trust among countries. Among these, participation in voluntary associations received most attention. Yet there is scant evidence that participation can lead to trust. In this article, the authors examine a variable that has not gotten the attention it deserves in the discussion about the sources of generalized trust, namely, equality. They conceptualize equality along two dimensions: economic equality and equality of opportunity. The omission of both these dimensions of equality in the social capital literature is peculiar for several reasons. First, it is obvious that the countries that score highest on social trust also rank highest on economic equality, namely, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and Canada. Second, these countries have put a lot of effort in creating equality of opportunity, not least in regard to their policies for public education, health care, labor market opportunities, and (more recently) gender equality. The argument for increasing social trust by reducing inequality has largely been ignored in the policy debates about social trust. Social capital research has to a large extent been used by several governments and policy organizations to send a message to people that the bad things in their society are caused by too little volunteering. The policy implications that follow from the authors' research is that the low levels of trust and social capital that plague many countries are caused by too little government action to reduce inequality. However, many countries with low levels of social trust and social capital may be stuck in what is known as a social trap. The logic of such a situation is the following. Social trust will not increase because massive social inequality prevails, but the public policies that could remedy this situation cannot be established precisely because there is a genuine lack of trust. This lack of trust concerns both “other people” and the government institutions that are needed to implement universal policies.

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The existing literature on the determinants of income redistribution has identified a ‘paradox’. Namely, that countries with a high degree of market income inequality redistribute little, which is in disagreement with the median voter theorem. In a first step, this paper outlines several mechanisms that explain why government corruption might be partially responsible for this ‘paradox’. In a second step, different corruption perception indices and an instrumental variable approach are used to provide empirical evidence that indicates a significant negative impact of corruption on redistribution levels for a sample of 148 developing and developed countries. This finding suggests that, next to political and need factors, government corruption explains to some extent the ‘paradox of redistribution’. This is especially true for many developing countries, given that they typically have relatively high degrees of corruption and low levels of redistribution.

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Even though political trust has been well studied so far in its structure, development and conditions, there are hardly any analyses dealing with the important question of what political trust – and particularly a lack or decline of political trust – implies for the citizens' reaction to public policy and policy changes. This article will focus on the effects of political trust on the willingness of German citizens to accept recent reforms of retirement pension, health care and family aid. It aims to highlight the following questions: Does political trust of the population encourage the disposition to support welfare state reforms? How do the characteristics of different policy reforms affect the impact of political trust on support of reform? The empirical evidence presented in this paper underpins the role of political trust as a valuable resource in attitudes towards reforms. Although political trust is not the most important determinant of support for welfare state reform and does not play the same role under all circumstances, it impacts positively on approval of reforms.

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A central component of institutional trust is related to perceptions of state capacity. Claims have been made that if citizens’ experiences with the state tell them that the government is efficacious, fair and trustworthy, then the odds for supporting publicly financed welfare policies are higher compared to a situation when their experiences with government feed feelings of inefficiency, corruption, unfairness and arbitrary discretion. The general question guiding the empirical analysis is the following: Is distrust in institutional capability an important prerequisite for general welfare state support withdrawal? Relying on Swedish nationally representative survey data, this issue is examined using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). Empirical evidence suggests that distrust in the institutional capability of the welfare state has not translated into widespread anti-welfare state sentiments. For some citizens, distrust in the capability of the welfare state is an issue of insufficient resources and they are willing to increase social spending in order to improve social services and benefits. For other citizens, distrust is closely connected with anti-welfare state sentiments. The article discusses the implications of the results for arguments about institutional trust and welfare state support.

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The article explores the attitudes and perceptions of those at the top of the income scale toward economic inequalities. Through a qualitativecase study, it presents how a group of top 0.1% of earners in Finland—one of the most equal countries in the world—perceive and legitimize economic disparities in an era of rising inequalities. By drawing together studies of economic inequality with the sociology of elites, the article analyzes the cultural repertoires through which the top earners make sense of inequality. As its key finding, it introduces the concept of hyperopia of wealth to describe the discursive blindness that the wealthy respondents have toward the structural conditions of economic disparities. The results indicate that top earners have a tendency to either ignore or approve the existing inequalities while disregarding the role of the wealthy and wealth in the dynamics. This blindness is named as hyperopia of wealth, analogous to a condition in which one cannot see things that are close clearly.

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We show that the wealthiest 5% in the U.S. favor less government redistribution than the general population. Differences in tax and political attitudes between the top 5% and bottom 95% are not just due to self-interested reasons but rather driven by different fairness views. Wealthy Americans have a higher tolerance for inequality, measured in an experiment in which individuals act as third-party spectators and make distributive choices between two workers. The gap in inequality acceptance is primarily driven by business owners and individuals who acquired wealth over their lifetime rather than those who were born into wealth. Our findings raise the possibility that wealthy individuals, especially those who experienced upward social mobility, contribute to the persistent economic inequality in the U.S.

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Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

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Inequality is on the rise: gains have been concentrated with a small elite, while most have seen their fortunes stagnate or fall. Despite what scholars and journalists consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence of growing popular concern about inequality. In fact, research suggests that citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox? I argue that citizens’ consent to inequality is explained by their growing conviction that societal success is reflective of a meritocratic process. Drawing on 25 years of International Social Survey Program data, I show that rising inequality is legitimated by the popular belief that the income gap is meritocratically deserved: the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem nonmeritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections.

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To be responsive, politicians have to rely on beliefs about public will. Previous research suggests that perceptions of public opinion are often distorted. However, it remains unclear (1) why reelection-seeking officials misperceive public preferences and (2) how to mitigate these distorted beliefs. I argue that misperceptions result from unequal exposure to different subconstituencies and a tendency of legislators to project their own preferences on voters. I find support for these arguments in a six-wave panel of Swedish MPs combined with mass surveys. Elite beliefs disproportionately reflect the preferences of privileged voters and the personal positions of legislators. Additionally, an experiment with Swiss representatives leveraging real political events reveals how misperceptions can be reduced by encouraging a more balanced exposure to voters. The study concludes that economic and political inequalities are rooted in elite beliefs about the electorate and reveals ways to bolster the links between voters and their representatives.

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Some scholars champion broad conceptualizations of democracy where distribution of economic resources is an integral part, whereas several prominent arguments drawing on narrower conceptualizations of democracy still assume that progressive redistribution is central to democratic politics. We empirically analyse individual opinions on whether progressive taxation and redistribution are among democracy's central characteristics. While many citizens around the world associate democracy with redistribution, we find that surprisingly few consider redistribution among the most central characteristics of democracy. We further analyse what factors affect individuals’ propensity to consider redistribution among democracy's most important features. Running multi-level models, we find that having lived under a communist regime and − although less robust – currently living under democracy make individuals less likely to hold this notion. However, individuals with more to gain from progressive redistribution (that is, little education and belonging to lower classes) are more likely to hold it. We discuss how our findings help shed light on two puzzles in comparative politics; (I) why do democracies not promote more redistributive policies than autocracies, and (II) why is there no net relationship between income inequality and democratization?

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Authoritarian predispositions are associated with a preference for order, certainty, and security. Using data from European Social Surveys (ESS), we show that this association extends to attitudes towards redistributive policies. We demonstrate that support for redistributive policies that emphasize the government’s responsibility to provide old age, health, and unemployment benefits are positively associated with authoritarian predispositions. We also provide evidence that perceived economic threats moderate this relationship such that, for individuals who perceive higher levels of economic threat, the relationship between authoritarian predispositions and support for government responsibility is stronger. These results show that authoritarian predispositions are not only associated with social preferences but also attitudes towards economic policies.

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In the current climate of welfare reform, it is important to understand how perceptions of the poor affect policy decisions. This paper examines how people distinguish between the undeserving poor and the deserving poor, and how this differentiation affects policy decisions. Survey respondents rated each policy in a set of hypothetical policies on a liberal-conservative continuum. Analyses were then conducted to explore differences in the respondents' likelihood of recommending the most liberal and the most conservative of these policies. Study 1 demonstrated that liberal policies were more likely to be recommended and conservative policies were less likely to be recommended when the target group was perceived to be deserving rather than undeserving. Study 2 replicated this effect of perceived deservingness and demonstrated an effect of attribution of responsibility. That is, liberal policies were more likely to be recommended and conservative policies were less likely to be recommended when the responsibility for the target's poverty was attributed to society rather than to the individual.

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We present new evidence showing that fiscal austerity strengthens support for redistribution, especially for the relatively well-off. Our theoretical model proposes two mechanisms to explain this heterogeneity in support for redistribution: ‘altruism’ and ‘appreciation’. We test our theoretical model’s predictions by matching attitudes reported in the British Social Attitudes Survey with local area-level spending cuts in England over the period 2010 to 2015. We exploit the spatial and temporal variation in spending cuts at the Local Authority level to compute a plausibly exogenous measure of the austerity shock. We find evidence for these two channels.

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Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments.

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This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.

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The issue of welfare targeting is back on the political agenda in European welfare states. Benefit recipients are subject to different rules, depending on age, family status and work. For instance, strict conditions and harsh sanctions apply, in particular, to young unemployed people. This article investigates public opinion towards welfare targeting in three policy areas – unemployment benefits, conditionality of benefits and sanctions – and utilizes a factorial vignette experiment presented within a representative German survey. The results suggest strong support for welfare targeting. Respondents are more likely to offer generous benefits and fewer obligations and sanctions to unemployed people who are elderly, have caring responsibilities, are of German ethnicity and have high job-seeking ambitions. The negative effect of foreign ethnicity is moderated by the ideological standpoint of the respondent, highlighting the mechanisms underlying welfare chauvinism. Accordingly, policy support strongly depends on the individual circumstances of the affected target group.

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What explains variation in individual attitudes toward government deficits? Although macroeconomic stance is of paramount importance for contemporary governments, our understanding of its popular politics is limited. We argue that popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing. Information necessary to form preferences on the deficit is not provided neutrally, and its provision shapes how voters understand their interests. A wide range of evidence from Britain between 2010 and 2015 supports this claim. In the British Election Study, deficit attitudes vary systematically with the source of news consumption, even controlling for party identification. A structural topic model of two major newspapers' reporting shows that content varies systematically with respect to coverage of public borrowing—in ways that intuitively accord with the attitudes of their readership. Finally, a survey experiment suggests causation from media to attitudes: deficit preferences change based on the presentation of deficit information.

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Despite the high incidence of ruralpoverty in the United States, the number of those receiving welfare benefits is lower in rural than in most urban areas. After analyzing data Erom a Pennsylvania survey, the author suggests that more negative attitudes toward welfare found among rural populations may account for this disparity.

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Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government appears to mediate only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsiveness occurs in large part through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.

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The article departs from the argument that research on welfare attitudes is, so far, dominated by large-scale survey-studies, which allow for generalizable insights into citizens' preferences and evaluations, but are necessarily limited in their ability to capture the dynamic and contextual aspects of attitude formation. In order to broaden the horizon of welfare attitudes' research, this article introduces a new qualitative method, namely deliberative forums. In these large group discussions—originally developed for participatory decision-making—attitudes, opinions, and preferences are core aspects of the deliberation process, and the article argues that by observing deliberation, we can observe attitude construction “in vivo”. The evidence from a two-day German deliberation event illustrates in an exploratory manner how information, reasoning, and group processes can influence people's evaluations and expressed policy preferences with regard to redistribution. By linking participants' answers from a survey before and after the event to their statements during the discussions, the article not only shows that the preferences for redistribution people expressed in the survey answers are often higher after the deliberative event, but also seeks to make sense of attitudinal dynamics on the basis of the qualitative material by pointing towards the role of information, reasoning, and group processes.

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According to a number of social psychological theories, attitudes toward government policies that people consider important should have substantial impact on presidential candidate preferences, and unimportant attitudes should have relatively little impact. Surprisingly, the accumulated evidence evaluating this hypothesis offers little support for it. This article reexamines the hypothesis, applying more appropriate analysis methods to data collected during the 1968, 1980, and 1984 American presidential election campaigns. The impact of policy attitudes on candidate preferences was indeed found to depend on the importance of those attitudes, just as theory suggests. The analysis also documented two mechanisms of this increased impact: People for whom a policy attitude is important perceive larger differences between competing candidates' attitudes, and important attitudes appear to be more accessible in memory than unimportant ones. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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We present evidence of the kind of governmental processes Americans would like to see in Washington. People believe they have been excluded from current processes, but they do not want direct democracy. The extent to which individuals believe actual processes are inconsistent with their own process preferences is an important variable in understanding the current public mood. Moreover, individual-level differences in level of dissatisfaction with democratic processes help explain variations in public approval of government and in willingness to comply with the outputs of government. Of course, many political attitudes and behaviors are influenced by fondness for the policies that government produces, but it is also the case that sentiments and actions are affected by the way government produces those policies. Far from being merely a means to a policy end, governmental process is important in its own right.

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Individuals with a higher social position are more tolerant of current income inequality than individuals with a lower social position. Besides this, attitudes towards income inequality are influenced by inequality-legitimising myths in a given society. Little is known about how these two factors interact. This study combines these two lines of research and argues that different social strata are more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies with strong prevalent meritocratic perceptions. We expect lower-status individuals (i.e. with a lower income or education) to experience a threat to their group esteem and therefore be less likely to support their society’s inequalities in societies with such strong meritocratic perceptions. This hypothesis was tested using data from the International Social Survey Programme 2009 (Social Inequality) on 39 countries. The results show that different social strata are indeed more polarised in their attitudes towards inequality in societies where meritocratic perceptions are more prevalent. Our results are robust for income, but not for education. This suggests that in perceived meritocracies, people regard income as the primary indicator of effort and ability.

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By means of a re‐analysis of public opinion surveys between 1973–76 (Political Action), 1985 and 1990 (International Social Survey on the ‘Role of Government I + II'), perceptions of government responsibilities are studied over time and across nations. Even if affiliated to government parties, the public, in the short run, does not reinforce prevailing trends uncritically, but in a mood of sophisticated scepticism tends rather to take an anti‐cyclical stance. Inspite of a uniform change across all nations from ‘interventionist’ beliefs to a more ‘neo‐liberal’ creed in the long run, historically endorsed national differences, rooted in inherited attitudes towards the proper role of government still exist.

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We test whether politicians’ communications shape their supporters’ policy priorities by conducting a field experiment in collaboration with several local elected officials. In the experiment, the officials sent out email messages to the constituents on their distribution lists. Half the constituents received messages where the official advocated for the priority of a given issue, while the other half received a placebo email. We surveyed the constituents one to two months before the message went out and again the week after the official sent the message. The experiment shows that politicians did not change citizens’ priorities in the desired direction. Moreover, citizens who received a message where the official indicated the issue was a priority were not more likely to act when invited to sign a petition on the issue. Elected officials’ ability to shape the priorities of the politically active citizens with whom they regularly communicate is limited and can even be self-defeating.

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Studies on public opinion about welfare already acknowledge the role context plays in individual attitudes towards welfare. However, the much-debated effect of socially held values and beliefs on attitudes towards social policy has not been empirically investigated. Drawing on studies in political and social psychology, as well as Shalom Schwartz's work on universal human values, this article argues that social values, specifically egalitarianism and embeddedness, affect individual support for social welfare policies. Moreover, we posit that social values condition the effect that individual ideological orientations have on attitudes towards government responsibility, such that the effect of embeddedness is much stronger for right-wing and moderate identifiers than those who lean towards the left. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Role of Government module and employing multi-level modelling. Our results provide evidence of the importance of social context and shared values in influencing attitudes towards welfare.

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Do policies that shape equality in schools have effects on the type of society and polity that the citizens educated in them want? This paper examines this question by analyzing variation in the English schooling experiences using the British Cohort Study and British Panel Study. It shows that the social environment of schooling affects adults’ attitudes to fairness and Conservative vote choice, but that policies targeting these social environments have weak effects. The paper theorizes that actual policy feedback in education is often limited, because the effects of policies on school experiences are mediated by the behaviors of other actors on the ground.

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This article introduces democratic forums as a method of studying attitudes towards the welfare state, and sets out briefly its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with existing methods. This is done by reporting the findings of a 2015 two-day forum based in the United Kingdom, in which the future of the welfare state was discussed by a largely representative sample of participants. The results show that participants linked both moral and economic arguments to come to two major framings that could encompass the debates surrounding the future of welfare states. One focuses on the inefficiencies of the welfare state, which found that welfare resources were largely misdirected and unsustainable. The other focuses on the possibilities for improving it via social investment, for example providing individuals with better training and education opportunities. The democratic forum method is helpful in allowing researchers to investigate the conceptual framings people use when thinking about the welfare state, and to see how people link different concepts and justifications together to argue their position. We argue that such framing can be distinct from that used and understood by policymakers and academics, and those applied in the more commonly used large scale surveys.

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This contribution describes differences between 10 migrant groups and natives in their attitudes towards government spending in three residence countries: Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. Previous research provided evidence that “migrants” as a catch-all category of people from different origins are in favor of more government spending on social welfare. We study to what extent support for government spending can be explained by self-interest explanations of welfare state attitudes as well as by differences in ideological position. The contribution employs data from the Migrants' Welfare State Attitudes project, including migrant groups from similar origins in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The study moves beyond the larger migrant groups of Turks and Poles that received attention in previous research as well, and includes a greater variety of groups that differ in terms of their skill levels. The overall finding is that migrants' welfare state spending preferences are, as in the case of natives, significantly related to socio-demographic differences and standard ideology measures of attitudes to regulation of the economy and family values. However, even with these standard variables included, spending preferences differ strongly between migrant groups, residence countries, and welfare spending domain. A comparison between country of origin and residence country provisions seems to be a promising path for further understanding migrant group differences in welfare state spending attitudes. The study challenges the idea that all migrants are supportive of extended welfare state arrangements.

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How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same scale (U.S. dollars), we can quantify both the association of policy outcomes with preferences across states (responsiveness) and their deviation within states (bias). We demonstrate that while minimum wages respond to corresponding preferences across states, policy outcomes are more conservative than preferences in each state, with the average policy bias amounting to about two dollars. We also show that policy bias is substantially smaller in states with access to direct democratic institutions.

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A considerable portion of European citizens are in favour of limited or conditional access for migrants to welfare provisions. Previous studies found that this welfare chauvinism is stronger among citizens with less favourable economic positions. This study seeks to explain the relationship between economic risk, both objective and subjective, and welfare chauvinism by looking at two distinct mechanisms: the traditional economic explanation of economic egalitarianism and the cultural explanation of ethnic threat. Given the lack of longitudinal studies, we also examine whether changes in economic risk, economic egalitarianism and threat can explain changes in welfare chauvinism over time. Using a four-wave panel-study (2013–2015) collected in Great Britain and the Netherlands, these relationships were studied both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The longitudinal mediation model was tested by making use of parallel process latent growth curve modelling. In both Great Britain and the Netherlands, economic egalitarianism and ethnic threat explained the link between economic risk and welfare chauvinism. Furthermore, in both countries, an increase over time in perceptions of ethnic threat was found to be the driving force behind an increase in welfare chauvinism, irrespective of changes in economic egalitarianism.

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Despite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded between September 2002 and December 2013.

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While much is known about the influence of partisan elites on mass opinion, relatively little is known about peer-to-peer influence within parties. We test the impact of messages signaling political parties’ issue stances on citizens’ own professed policy preferences, comparing the influence of party elites to that of co-partisan peers. Using an online experiment conducted with a quasi-representative sample of Americans, we demonstrate across two policy domains (education and international trade) that the opinions of co-partisan peers are just as influential on citizens’ policy preferences as the opinions of party elites. Further, the mechanisms underlying elite and peer influence appear to differ, with conformity to peers—but not elites—driven almost exclusively by strength of social identification with the party.

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Past experiences and expectations about the future shape how people think about work and welfare. Given the uncertainty many young people face when entering the labor market, we investigate whether 1) young peoples’ experiences of social mobility and 2) their future mobility expectations impact their attitudes regarding the meaning of work and welfare. Drawing on the concepts of self-interest and deservingness, we examine how both the experiences and expectations of intergenerational social mobility influence the ways in which young adults view the so-called moral dimension of work and welfare. Results of logistic regression analyses of around 11,000 young adults in eleven countries suggest that the relationship between mobility and individuals’ views on work and welfare varies depending on the dimension of mobility (economic and social origins, for example), with expected future mobility exerting a stronger effect on attitudes than past mobility experiences. We find that self-interest, not empathy with one’s social origins, appears to be the primary driver of these attitudes.

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Is public support for social welfare programs’ contingent on an individual’s exposure to risk? Prior work has examined whether tough economic times lead people to “reach out” (i.e. become more accepting of government expansion of social welfare programs) or “pull back” (i.e. become less supportive of welfare). However, these studies do not account for the conditional relationship between an individual’s exposure to risk and his or her risk orientation. Using new survey data, we find that an individual’s risk orientation moderates the relationship between risk exposure and public support for welfare spending. When individuals perceive exposure to economic risk, those who are risk averse are highly supportive of welfare expansion; those who are risk acceptant become less supportive. Broadly, these findings suggest that public support for welfare spending is contingent on whether an individual perceives exposure to risk and, if so, the individual’s propensity to tolerate that risk.

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This study examines public attitudes to various social security programmes in the modern flexible economy. While numerical and functional flexibility have become more important in most European countries, these types of flexibility are assumed to affect job security, community feeling and, as a consequence, public attitudes to social security in contradictory ways. An analysis of recent Dutch survey data indicates that support for social security programmes, particularly unemployment spending, can be understood in terms of the increased levels of internal job insecurity experienced by ‘atypical’ workers. In contrast to some of the arguments that are outlined in this article, it appears that the emergence of a flexible labour market has not affected levels of community feeling.

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Ethnicity coding means that threat-based views of ethnic minority members spur opposition to specific welfare programmes. To advance knowledge of the influence of political parties on ethnicity coding, we apply a dynamic approach. Longitudinal analyses show that: a) because right-wing political parties persistently frame state pensions as benefitting native majority members, a perceived ethnic threat increases support for this welfare scheme, and b) a perceived ethnic threat reduces support for social assistance when right-wing political parties frame it as favouring immigrants. Extending these findings, we show that opposition to immigrant welfare rights prompts electoral realignment, as left-wing voters increasingly switch to right-wing parties. More generally, political parties are capable of stimulating opposition to parts of the welfare state, including electoral mobilization against immigrant welfare rights. We utilize unusually rich mass-level survey data from Denmark, covering a 25-year period (1990‒2015). The broader implications of our findings for theories of ethnicity coding, political elite persuasion, and welfare state development are discussed in the conclusion.

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In this article, we explore the associations of people’s valuations of universal healthcare with risk exposure and humanitarianism across diverse institutional contexts. We argue that both micro-level factors increase the valuations. Furthermore, interactions between material interests and humanitarians are expected. This work also hypothesizes that institutional contexts with employment-independent healthcare systems should modify the effect of risk exposure. Following a comparative framework, we test the expectations by using the International Social Survey Programme 2011 health module for 28 developed and developing countries. Results suggest opposite effects for the factors under analysis. While risk exposure decreases the willingness to pay taxes for the provision of universal healthcare, humanitarianism strongly fosters the valuation. Furthermore, we find statistical significant interactions between material interests and humanitarianism. Results also suggest substantive cross-level interactions between risk exposure and healthcare systems. Findings are robust to different modeling strategies that control for standard micro-level variables (income and egalitarianism), individual factors and observed and unobserved country characteristics. The article lays out implications of these findings.

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What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutional conditions, bureaucratic development, election results, and public opinion. Political mediation theory holds that social movements can have influence over progressive policy under favorable political conditions. Policy feedback theory holds that programs will be self-reinforcing under certain conditions. The article goes beyond previous research by including and analyzing public opinion in institutional political and political mediation models and addressing positive policy feedbacks. We appraise five models derived from these three theories through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses of the generosity of early old-age policy across U.S. states at two key moments. We find some support for each theory, and the results suggest that they are complementary. Left regimes or social movements can initiate progressive policy, which can be reinforced for the long term through positive policy feedback mechanisms. We discuss the implications for current U.S. politics and for progressive policy elsewhere.

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Opinion polls may inadvertently affect public opinion, as people may change their attitudes after learning what others think. A disconcerting possibility is that opinion polls have the ability to create information cascades, wherein the majority opinion becomes increasingly larger over time. Testing poll influence on attitudes toward Syrian refugees and mandatory measles vaccination, we field survey experiments on a probability-based online survey panel. Through a novel automated procedure labeled the dynamic response feedback, we measure whether the answers from early poll respondents can influence the opinions of subsequent respondents who learn the answers of the previous respondents. Using this procedure, no feedback loops are identified.

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Why do governments recognize rights? In this article, we rely on natural experiments and an innovative matching technique to identify a new causal mechanism of policy feedback, which we refer to as the “recognition” effect. We rely on the “hard case” of health care to demonstrate that attitudes towards the health system change in response to government policy change and, indeed, even to rights-based initiatives. During the time when public opinion surveys on public satisfaction with the health system were in the field, governments in both Germany and Sweden introduced a new right: the right to a maximum waiting time for health services. This serendipity allowed us to compare respondents' attitudes both before (control) and after the implementation of the waiting time guarantee (treatment), using coarsened exact matching to account for the imbalances in the treatment and control groups. We find that respondents interviewed after implementation of the new waiting time guarantees (in contrast to those interviewed before the introduction of the guarantees) express higher levels of satisfaction with the health system in general, but do not evaluate their specific medical treatment (including waiting times) more positively. We interpret this finding as evidence that citizens respond to governmental recognition of their rights as a good per se, independent of their personal experience with the particular public service at hand. Thus, we argue that theories of policy feedback need to move beyond their focus on direct material experience with the policies at hand, and to incorporate mechanisms of symbolic action and normative valuations into their causal models.

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This chapter explores public opinion on healthcare from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. It critically reviews the literature surrounding public opinion on healthcare, teasing out the main concepts used—support for public healthcare provision/spending, overall evaluations of the healthcare systems, and the political salience of healthcare—while also discussing implications, gaps, and potential new research avenues. The chapter examines the operationalization of these key measures in large-scale survey items and compares trends in Europe over time. While Europeans mostly agree that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure adequate healthcare, there is much more regional variation when it comes to satisfaction with healthcare systems, and their political salience. The chapter concludes by arguing for the need to further examine the link between these key public opinion measures and their impact on health policy reform.

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Attitudes towards social spending and the welfare state have been characterised by one of the longest standing and widest gender gaps. Past research suggests that parenthood deepens this divide further. Yet, the exact relationship between parenthood and support for social policies – and the gendered nature of this process – has been difficult to establish because it can vary across welfare policy areas and the age of the children, which past studies, relying on cross-sectional data, has found difficult to unravel. Using panel data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine individual level changes in fathers’ and mothers’ views towards specific welfare state policies. We find that individuals’ support for social spending fluctuates at different stages of parenthood, and that mothers’ demands differ from fathers’ in relation to care related but not in terms of educational spending. This implies that parents are not a homogeneous group that parties could target with uniform electoral pledges. As a result, building widespread electoral support for expanding a broad range of social investment policies is likely to be challenging in a context where, first and foremost, self-interest appears to drive (or depress) individuals’ support for specific welfare state policies.

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Differences in welfare attitudes of Eastern and Western Europeans have often been explained in terms of legacies of communism. In this article, we explore evaluations of healthcare systems across European countries and argue that East–West differences in these evaluations are explained by differences in the current institutional design of healthcare systems in the two regions. The empirical analysis is based on the fourth round of the European Social Survey, applying multilevel and multilevel mediation analysis. Our results support the institutional explanation. Regional differences in healthcare evaluations are explained by institutional characteristics of the healthcare system, that is, lower financial resources, higher out-of-pocket payments, and lower supply of primary healthcare services in Eastern compared to Western European countries. We conclude that specific aspects of the current institutional design of healthcare systems are crucial for understanding East–West differences in healthcare evaluations and encourage research to further explore the relevance of institutions for differences in welfare state attitudes across socio-political contexts.

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Knowing the public opinion of healthcare is essential when assessing healthcare system performance; but little research has focussed on the links between the public’s general attitude to the healthcare system and its perceptions and expectations of specific healthcare-related aspects. Using data from the fourth round of the European Social Survey 2008/09, we explore the cognitive determinants of global evaluations of the healthcare system in 12 Eastern and 16 Western European countries. We find that healthcare evaluations follow a coherent cognitive reasoning. They are associated with (i) perceptions of the performance of healthcare systems (i.e. efficiency, equality of treatment, health outcomes), (ii) expectations of the government’s role in providing healthcare, and (iii) reflections on demographic pressures (i.e. aging populations). Contrary to the general assumption that normative expectations are responsible for differences in healthcare evaluations between Eastern and Western Europe, our results suggest that regional differences are largely due to a more negative perception of the performance of healthcare systems within Eastern Europe. To enhance the public opinion of healthcare, policy makers should improve the efficiency of healthcare systems and take measures to assure equality in health treatment.

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Abstract. In this article, we develop an institutional politics theory of public social provision and examine U.S. social spending programs at the end of the N

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Mature welfare states must increasingly handle growing fiscal pressures and a multitude of needs with smaller resources. Meanwhile, evaluations of policy outputs are characterized as ‘the weakest link’ in welfare state support, resulting in generalized political distrust. We assess the procedural fairness argument that citizens are not only concerned with welfare state outcomes but also assess the fairness of the processes of service delivery. The fairness perspective has usually been tested in cross-sectional studies, experiments or on the ‘input side’ of democracy. By contrast, we use primary three-wave panel data on evaluations and experiences with welfare state institutions. The random-effects within-between framework allows improved causal evidence that both outputs (service quality satisfaction) and procedural fairness (experienced voice opportunities) affect political trust. Crucially, however, perceived fairness mitigates detrimental effects of poor outcomes. This is because procedural voice matters, especially for the formation of political trust among losers.

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Stigmatising stereotypes about welfare recipients play a crucial role in building public support for welfare retrenchment. Existing literature finds that the highly educated are more sympathetic towards welfare recipients. This is surprising given the economic advantage associated with educational attainment. Furthermore, educational attainment has increased even as sympathy for welfare recipients has declined. I address these puzzles using three decades of British survey data and find that it is the socially liberal attitudes rather than the economic advantage associated with higher education that explains why this group is sympathetic towards welfare recipients. These findings reveal an educational cleavage in stereotypes about welfare recipients, which is based on non-economic concerns, and has implications for support for welfare retrenchment and policies such as increased conditionality. This cleavage is weaker in more highly educated regions, implying that there are diminishing returns from increasing educational attainment in terms of sympathetic attitudes towards welfare recipients. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

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This article addresses the potential role played by social media analysis in promoting interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. We show that in a “Big Data” world, the comments posted online by social media users can profitably be used to extract meaningful information, which can support the action of policymakers along the policy cycle. We analyze Twitter data through the technique of Supervised Aggregated Sentiment Analysis. We develop two case studies related to the “jobs act” labor market reform and the “#labuonascuola” school reform, both formulated and implemented by the Italian Renzi cabinet in 2014–15. Our results demonstrate that social media data can help policymakers to rate the available policy alternatives according to citizens' preferences during the formulation phase of a public policy; can help them to monitor citizens' opinions during the implementation phase; and capture stakeholders' mobilization and de-mobilization processes. We argue that, although social media analysis cannot replace other research methods, it provides a fast and cheap stream of information that can supplement traditional analyses, enhancing responsiveness and institutional learning.

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This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional analysis of emergency relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions in the 48 American states. It analyzes six outcomes: state emergency-relief expenditures and federal emergency-relief expenditures from 1933 to 1935; the timing of passage of unemployment-compensation legislation; the timing of passage of old-age pension legislation; and the contents of old-age pension and unemployment-compensation legislation. These outcomes represent different dimensions of social policy and are used to appraise three theoretical approaches: economic, democratic politics, and statist explanations. In the analysis, the sample is split into industrialized and nonindustrialized states, in accordance with recent cross-national research on social policy and social spending. Although the results yield some support for all three perspectives, the statist perspective is especially well supported. The findings suggest that the different perspectives are limited in applicability to specific outcomes or samples, or both. The superior performance of the statist perspective is due to its applicability across outcomes and subsamples.

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Suburban exploitation of the central city was once a hotly contested issue, but the exodus of people and jobs from the city and the involvement of the federal government in urban service provision have moved it from the forefront of scholarly attention. Those same developments, however, argue for more rather than less attention to exploitation, and the purpose of this paper is to offer some of that. Using data collected for 188 relatively comparable American SMSAs for 1960,1970, and 1980, the paper begins with a replication of an earlier study by Kasarda of suburban demands for city service spending. It then extends that research to 1980 and expands it to assess suburban participation in city retail sales generation as well. The results indicate a substantive narrowing over time of suburban demands for city services, but a sizeable and growing gap nonetheless between expenditures demanded and retail revenues provided. The paper then turns to an analysis that attempts to test empirically the relative merits of ecological and politicoeconomic explanations for these changes. The results of that test are more supportive of the former than the latter; hence, the paper concludes with an interpretation of them that links to underlying ecological processes the changing social psychological perspective on the city and its role in social life held by surrounding suburban dwellers.

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In this last chapter, it will be asked to what extent the different institutional configurations which have been explored in previous chapters correspond to patterns of public support for welfare state intervention. In order to do so, a broader set of countries, chosen to represent different welfare state regimes both within and outside Western Europe are compared.

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Through policy feedback mechanisms, public policies can shape individuals’ preferences for those policies. While research has focused on the direct link between policies and preferences, how policies alter individuals’ preferences through indirect means remains less explored. Broadly, we argue that how micro-level factors influence policy preferences is contingent on the policy context, and specifically we contend that how economic risk influences preferences is contingent on the policy institutions that privatize social protection responsibilities. Using healthcare policy as the empirical context, we show that the level of privatization in national healthcare systems will colour how the risk of unemployment affects preferences for government healthcare.

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This project examines existing data in the International Social Science Survey/ Australia on Australians’ attitudes towards provision of income for the elderly in order to increase FaCS’s knowledge of public support for both current and alternative policies for provision in old age. More specifically, we set out (1) to assess, so far as is possible from these existing data what are Australians preferences and attitudes in this domain, and where possible to assess how they have changed over time and how they differ from attitudes in other countries, and (2) to explore potential sources of social differences in these attitudes using multivariate statistical models. This project intended to explore the existing material with an eye to future research. In particular, we aimed (a) to examine what working hypotheses could be developed from these data and what questions are worth replicating on an on-going basis, and (b) to lay the foundations for future projects asking new questions more explicitly focused on the current situation.

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This paper examines the working lives of more than 110,000 individuals across twenty-three countries over an eight year period, 1985-1992. Both quantitative and qualitative data are examine. The data source is the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The paper finds that the young are distinguished from older age groups by the following traits: they are less well paid and have a relatively high probability of being unemployed. They also have a low probability of being a member of the force, being self-employed or a member of a trade union. In terms of their attitudes the young are more likely than older age groups to say a) they would like to be self-employed if they had the choice b) to be supportive of the role of trade unions c) to support government intervention in the market d) that they are very happy with their lives.

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Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

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In this paper attitudes to redistribution in eight Western nations are analysed, using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP).The paper begins with a discussion of various ‘regime types’as presented by Esping- Andersen and Castles and Mitchell, among others. Gauntries are then chosen to represent four ‘twin pairs’of countries, approximating four ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’: the social democratic (Sweden/Norway), the conservative (Germany/Austria), the liberal (US/Canada), and the radical (Australia/New Zealand). The empirical analysis assesses whether attitudes to redistribution and income differences are structured in the way suggested by the discussion of different cleavage structures in various regime types. It is concluded that while the level of attitudes regarding redistribution and income differences clearly is affected by regime type, group patterns are very similar between all the countries.

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Social transfer programs are thought to generate beneficiary groups who will act politically to defend “their” programs from retrenchment. But little empirical research has been conducted to either verify or disconfirm the micro foundations of this hypothesis, which lies at the heart of the “new social risks” thesis as well as many economic analyses of welfare state politics. This article tests empirically whether benefiting from public pensions leads individuals to greater support of the pension system status quo, net of other factors. It uses cross—data set imputation to combine cross-nationally comparable individual-level data on income from public pensions with political attitudes toward proposed pension reforms. The hypothesis that public pension systems create policy feedbacks of self-interested beneficiaries supporting further pension spending is not supported in any of 11 European countries in either 1992 or 2001.

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This article reports the results of a replication of Brooks and Manza’s “Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies” published in 2006 in the American Sociological Review. The article finds that Brooks and Manza utilized an interaction term but excluded the main effect of one of the interacted variables. This model specification has specific implications: statistically, that the omitted main effect variable has no correlation with the residual error term from their regression; theoretically speaking, this means that all unobserved historical, cultural, and other characteristics that distinguish liberal democratic welfare regimes from others can be accounted for with a handful of quantitative measures. Using replicated data, this article finds that the Brooks and Manza models fail these assumptions. A sensitivity analysis using more than 800 regressions with different configurations of variables confirms this. In 99.5 percent of the cases, addition of the main effect removes Brooks and Manza’s empirical findings completely. A theoretical discussion illuminates why these findings are not surprising. This article provides a reminder that models and theories are coterminous, each implied by the other.

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Scholarly interest in the study of education from the perspective of political science has increased rapidly in the last few years. However, the literature focuses on comparing education politics at the country level, neglecting the analysis ofmicro-level foundations of education policies in terms of in dividual prefer ences and their interaction with macro contexts. This paper provides a first step in addressing this research gap, engaging in a multilevel analysis of survey data for a large number of OECD countries. The core research question is how institutional contexts- in this case socio-economic and educational inequalities shape the micro-level association between the individual income position and support for education spending . The core finding is that these different dimensions of inequality have different implications at the micro level. Higher levels of socio-economic inequality enhance the conflict between the rich and the poor over public investments in education. By contrast, when access to higher levels of educati on is effectively restricted, the rich are more likely to support public education spending. This is because higher levels of educational stratification ensure that further public investments in education benefit the rich relatively more than the poor, who in turn become less willing to support this kind of public spending.

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Research has found that education is associated with more liberal opinions on a number of issues, but there is uncertainty about the scope and interpretation of these findings. This study investigates the effects of education using data from the 1990 World Values Survey, which includes 40 nations and covers a wide range of opinions. Multi‐level models are used to allow for national variation in the effects of education, including interactions with economic development and Communist rule. Education influences most political opinions; the effects can be summarized by saying that it promotes individualist values. Education is associated with somewhat lower confidence in most institutions. The relationship between education and confidence becomes weaker with economic development, while the effects of education on a number of political views shift to the left with economic development. The results suggest that education deserves more attention in explanations of national differences and historical trends in opinion.

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This article discusses Nate Breznau’s critique of Brooks and Manza’s “Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies.” Brooks and Manza found that public opinion influenced welfare state spending, but Breznau argued that this conclusion was an artifact of their model, which included an interaction between opinion and welfare state type but omitted the main effect of welfare state type. Breznau is correct in saying that interactions should not be used without including the main effect, except in rare circumstances which do not apply in this case. However, the classification of welfare state type is made partly on the basis of the dependent variable, welfare spending, so it should not be used as an independent variable. There is, however, a case for including a variable for the type of legal system (common law or civil law), which is correlated with welfare state type. The estimates from a regression including both main and interaction effects support Brooks’s and Manza’s original conclusions about the effect of public opinion. The paper concludes by discussing the strength of the evidence provided by the data.

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Previous studies of health system legitimacy have almost exclusively paid attention to patterns of service satisfaction and preference for state involvement. These two dimensions are related to substantial and procedural justice; i.e. the value of a certain policy and the way it is implemented. This study contributes to the research field by focusing on a third dimension that have been little studied so far: the willingness of citizens to contribute on a solidaristic basis. This dimension was captured through three health policy preferences: public healthcare spending willingness, opposition to co-payments and opposition to private health insurance. Building on the literature on welfare state legitimacy, the empirical model distinguished between two sets of predictors to explain individual differences: self-interest and ideological belief. Old age, poor health and poor economy is positively associated with opposition to co-payments for "self-inflicted" diseases, while low education and poor health is positively related to support for more public spending. Increasing age is furthermore positively associated with opposing co-payments and easier uptake of insurance. Liberal-conservative voters are less willing to spend more on healthcare but more willing to increase the use of co-payments and insurance.

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This study proposes a path model to examine the formation of public attitudes towards government's role in solving unemployment, comparing Great Britain and the United States. The ‘symbolic politics’ literature argues that people's policy preferences (regarded as ‘means attitudes’ in our study) are shaped by their general political and social values (regarded as ‘goal attitudes’); whereas most empirical research has focused on how SES characteristics directly translate into policy preferences. It is argued in this article that one's attitude towards government's responsibility in reducing income inequality (the goal attitude) is an important link through which SES influences one's attitude towards government's role in solving unemployment (the means attitude). SES characteristics are important in affecting the means attitudes only insofar as they shape the goal attitudes. It is also argued that perceptions of intergenerational mobility, a factor largely ignored by prior public opinion research, affect the means attitudes indirectly, operating through the goal attitudes. Based upon studies on the cultural/structural differences in the two countries, we predict party affiliation is more important in swaying public attitudes in Britain, whereas education and family income are more important in the United States. Multiple-item structural equation modeling is used to test these hypotheses with data from the 1985 Role of Government, International Social Survey Programme.

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Why are people who live in liberal welfare regimes so reluctant to support welfare policy? And why are people who live in social democratic welfare regimes so keen to support welfare policy? This article seeks to give an institutional account of these cross-national differences. Previous attempts to link institutions and welfare attitudes have not been convincing. The empirical studies have had large difficulties in finding the expected effects from regime-dependent differences in self-interest, class interest, and egalitarian values. This article develops a new theoretical macro—micro link by combining the literature on deservingness criteria and the welfare regime theory. The basic ideas are that three regime characteristics, (a) the degree of universalism in welfare policy, (b) the differences in economic resources between “the bottom” and “the majority,” and (c) the degree of job opportunities, have a profound impact on the public deservingness discussion and thereby on public support for welfare policy.

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Comparative research revealed that social programs did not suffer significant decline despite globalisation and stiffer international competition. Instead, a striking stability of social expenditure is observed which is explained by voters’ demands for social protection because of new uncertainties connected to economic openness. The domestic demand approach conceives the welfare state as a means to compensate for the risks a globalised economy puts on citizens’ job security, and as a means to foster the acceptance of an open economy. Given the prominence of these assumptions little research has been conducted to test them. Does economic openness actually increase unemployment and feelings of job insecurity? Does this in turn lead to a higher voter demand for social security? This paper analyses the propositions of domestic demand approaches based on a data set comprised of waves of the module “Role of Government” from the International Social Survey Programme (1990, 1996 and 2006) and additional country-level features. The results show that economic openness has a negative effect when other insecurity-causing trends are controlled. Also subjective job insecurity instead of the projected positive effect rather shows a negative relation. Social security demand decreases the more job insecurity people perceive. This is interpreted as a consequence of the fear of those still employed that voting for more expenditures would endanger existing jobs. Moreover, the hypothesis that economic openness now spreads economic risks and feelings of insecurity over a broader social strata rather than remaining mired at the low end of the social spectrum is not confirmed.

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Rising levels of income inequality have been directly linked to rising levels of spatial segregation. In this paper we explore whether rising segregation may in turn erode support for the redistributive policies of the welfare state, further increasing levels of inequality—a form of positive feedback. The role of the neighbourhood has been neglected in attitudes research but, building on both political geography and ‘neighbourhood effects’ literatures, we theorise that neighbourhood context may shape attitudes through the transmission of attitudes directly and through the accumulation of relevant knowledge. We test this through multilevel modelling of data from England on individual attitudes to redistribution in general and to welfare benefit recipients in particular. We show that the individual factors shaping these attitudes are quite different and that the influence of neighbourhood context also varies as a result. The findings support the idea that neighbourhood context shapes attitudes, with the knowledge accumulation mechanism likely to be the more important. Rising spatial segregation would appear to erode support for redistribution but to increase support for welfare recipients—at least in a context where the dominant media discourse presents such a stigmatising image of those on welfare benefits.

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Deservingness theory contends that spending on the elderly is widely supported across age groups because, unlike other groups such as immigrants or the unemployed, senior citizens are perceived as morally worthy of social aid. However, through a survey experiment in Japan, a prototypical aging society, this study shows that in a state with a large population of senior citizens, there is a significant age gap in policy preferences with the working-age population demonstrating stronger opposition to government support for the elderly. To induce empathetic policy attitudes toward the elderly, therefore, effective issue framing is necessary. However, emphasizing economic need is not enough; it is only when both the elderly’s economic need and effort to work are emphasized that we see a positive attitudinal change among the working-age population. In addition, we find that the economically secure are more sensitive to senior citizens’ economic need and effort to work in determining their policy support. By contrast, the economically insecure exhibit unqualified support for the elderly. These findings demonstrate that deservingness for the elderly is not innate, but is driven by conditional altruism. Furthermore, our work emphasizes the importance of issue framing in generating intergenerational solidarity in a rapidly aging society.

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While inequality between individuals is known to be an important determinant of redistributive preferences, research on inequality between groups has increased only recently. This paper argues that individuals infer income expectations from the economic standing of their social group, in particular groups based on characteristics determined at birth, such as sex, race, or parents class. High group incomes can lead individuals to oppose redistribution, even if they are currently poor. Analyses of US survey data from 1978 to 2014 support this argument. The uncovered effects on preferences exceed those of individual income by more than three times in magnitude.

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The main question of this chapter is: what determines individual level support for income redistribution by the government? This question is important for at least two reasons. To begin with, redistribution is a central activity of governments in all Western democracies. All OECD countries redistribute substantial shares of their gross national products. Second, redistributive questions are some of the most contested issues in democracies. How people align with and vote for parties is – at least partially – influenced by their different degrees of support for income redistribution.

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What role do people's attitudes toward social policies play for the politics of welfare state reform? This chapter contributes to a growing scholarship on policy responsiveness in welfare state research with a longitudinal comparative case study of the Bismarckian welfare states of France and Germany. Quantitative analyses of changes in mean attitudes as well as polarization and inequalities of attitudes based on the 1996, 2006, and 2016 waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Role of Government module are triangulated with a thick description of social policy changes. While recommodifying and defamilializing reforms in Germany transformed the welfare state fundamentally, there was more continuity in the French welfare state, in spite of a stronger focus on labor market activation policies. The quantitative results suggest that lower attitudinal stability toward the welfare state in Germany and lower polarization evoked a higher willingness for reform than in France, where more polarized attitudes and overall marginal changes in attitudes gave French governments less maneuverability in adopting reforms. In both countries, I find no evidence for an upper-class bias in policy responsiveness. In sum, my research supports the claim that change in public opinion toward the welfare state and diverging attitudes within societies play a role for the timing and direction of reforms.

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In this article, I discuss whether changes in European citizens’ financial circumstances during the Great Recession have affected their attitudes towards tax progressivity. I analysed data from a 2015 survey of citizens in 9 European countries that gathered information about the economic crisis at the household level and citizens’ preferences for tax progressivity. Results revealed that although citizens affected by the crisis were generally more likely to support progressive taxation, the impact of worsening economic circumstances was limited and not homogeneous across the sampled population. Citizens on the left of the ideological spectrum who suffered the economic setback did not show higher support for progressive taxation, while those in the centre and on the right did. Similarly, citizens who perceived their financial setbacks to be temporary and were optimistic about their economic prospects did not indicate increased support for tax progressivity, as opposed to those less optimistic about their future economic situation.

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How responsive are political parties to the issue priorities of voters? While there are numerous studies that examine policy position congruence between parties and voters or government responsiveness, we know little about the extent to which parties adjust their policy priorities to the issue concerns of voters. Following saliency and issue ownership theory, we argue that political parties listen to their voters by emphasizing policy issues in their election manifestos that have been prioritized by citizens. However, in line with second-order election theory, we expect that issue responsiveness varies with the electoral context. To test our theoretical expectations, we generated a novel dataset that combines data on issue attention of political parties from the Comparative Manifesto and the Euromanifesto projects with data on policy priorities of voters from the European Election Studies, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies. We empirically test our theoretical claims based on a comprehensive analysis of 104 parties from 17 countries competing in 84 national and European elections from 1986 to 2011. Our findings have important implications for political representation in Europe.

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If public attitudes towards the welfare state, inequality and immigration are becoming increasingly polarized, as recent political events might suggest, the space for progressive social policies is more constrained. Using data from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) spanning 23years, we analyse trends in these attitudes, examining whether there has been divergence between those who have been more and less exposed to disadvantage through changes in the economy and the welfare state across more than two decades. Taken in this longer term context, and examining characteristics not previously considered in relation to public attitudes such as lone parenthood and disability, we find little evidence of polarization in attitudes to welfare, inequality and immigration and even some evidence of attitudinal gaps narrowing. We conclude that given this lack of division, there may be greater room for more pro-welfare and progressive policies than the prevalent narrative of polarization suggests.

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This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.

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Since Converse (1964) first proposed his “nonattitudes hypothesis,” numerous studies have confirmed that the public at large lacks ideologically consistent political attitudes. I put forth an event-based theory of attitude crystallization that explains how elections can strengthen attitude consistency and apply it to an issue domain integral to the left-right (liberal-conservative) cleavage: welfare politics. Specifically, I theorize that elections that give ideological opponents a majority will mobilize ideological predispositions, leading to more coherent welfare attitudes. I test the argument by relying on 11 Danish surveys linked to official records on local elections over four decades and using a regression discontinuity design. Evidence strongly supports the notion that elections increase attitude consistency if the majority produced goes against the individual’s ideological preferences. The findings stress the dynamic nature of attitude structure and the important role regular political events play in that regard.

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With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and we...

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This article aims to explain the paradoxical finding that socio-economically vulnerable groups express more economic, moral and social criticism of the welfare state. As these groups generally benefit more from the welfare state and hold more egalitarian world views, their stronger criticism cannot be explained by the traditional frameworks of self-interest and ideology. As an alternative, we highlight the importance of social experiences of resentment as a source of discontent with welfare state performance. Our contribution argues that the dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populist critique that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. This welfare populism emerges from experiences of resentment related to the restructuring of group positions in the process of modernization. We differentiate between three types of discontent: economic status insecurity, group relative deprivation and social distrust. By applying structural equation modelling, we test whether resentful experiences mediate the relationship between the social structural position and welfare state criticism. Results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic, moral and social criticism. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment is indeed an important element for understanding the paradoxical relationship between social class and welfare state criticism.

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It is widely accepted that support for government intervention is highest among people in lower socioeconomic positions, during economic recessions and in less prosperous countries. However, the relationship between income inequality and attitudes toward government intervention is less clear. We contribute new insights to both questions by exploring how subjective household income, economic prosperity, and income inequality interact to influence attitudes. Using mixed-effects and country fixed-effects models fitted to data from 66 countries, we demonstrate that income inequality has a strong positive impact on attitudes toward government intervention in rich countries but no discernable effect in poor countries. Concomitantly, the impact of economic prosperity differs by level of inequality. It has little effect when income inequality is relatively low, a weakening effect as inequality rises, and no apparent effect when inequality is high. Consistent with these findings, the effect of subjective household income on attitudes toward government intervention is strongest in countries that are simultaneously very prosperous and highly unequal. Taken together, these findings suggest that if inequality continues to rise, especially in rich countries, public demand for social spending will eventually increase as well.

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Responding to public opinion is a fundamental function of the modern state. While numerous empirical studies have examined the opinion-policy link in the context of democracies, few have explored policy responsiveness in authoritarian countries and we know little about how local governments make policy decisions when the citizens’ preferences conflict with the directives of the superiors. Drawing on a survey experiment involving 3059 local officials in China, this study examines whether superiors’ priorities and citizens’ opinions have an impact on fiscal decision-making and how officials react to contradictory preferences between their superiors and the local public. Using randomized treatments that provide different scenarios across the samples, we find that local officials selectively comply with superiors’ directives and local citizens’ opinions. On the one hand, local officials would follow superiors’ directive for economic investment but might ignore those for welfare provision; on the other hand, they tend to respond to public opinion in a limited but significant fashion when the citizens’ preferences conflict with the superiors’ priorities. Moreover, the statistical results suggest that local officials’ policy preferences have a strong impact on their policy decisions. These findings help us to understand the behavior of local officials and highlight their roles in devising fiscal policies that foster local development.

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What kind of welfare state do voters of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) want and how do their preferences differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties? In this paper, we draw on an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related social policies in eight Western European countries to measure (1) support for social transfers, (2) support for workfare and (3) support for social investment. Challenging the view that PRRPs turned into pro-welfare parties, our results indicate that their voters want a particularistic-authoritarian welfare state, displaying moderate support only for ‘deserving’ benefit recipients (e.g. the elderly), while revealing strong support for a workfare approach and little support for social investment. These findings have important implications for contemporary debates about the future of capitalism and the welfare state.

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Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of “social preferences.” We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing social welfare—sacrificing to increase the payoffs for all recipients, especially low-payoff recipients—than with reducing differences in payoffs (as supposed in recent models). Subjects are also motivated by reciprocity: they withdraw willingness to sacrifice to achieve a fair outcome when others are themselves unwilling to sacrifice, and sometimes punish unfair behavior.

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Low public support for government interventions in health, environment and other policy domains can be a barrier to implementation. Communicating evidence of policy effectiveness has been used to influence attitudes towards policies, with mixed results. This review provides the first systematic synthesis of such studies. Eligible studies were randomized controlled experiments that included an intervention group that provided evidence of a policy's effectiveness or ineffectiveness at achieving a salient outcome, and measured policy support. From 6498 abstracts examined, there were 45 effect sizes from 36 eligible studies. In total, 35 (N = 30 858) communicated evidence of effectiveness, and 10 (N = 5078) communicated evidence of ineffectiveness. Random effects meta-analysis revealed that communicating evidence of a policy's effectiveness increased support for the policy (SMD = 0.11, 95% CI [0.07, 0.15], p < 0.0001), equivalent to support increasing from 50% to 54% (95% CI [53%, 56%]). Communicating evidence of ineffectiveness decreased policy support (SMD = −0.14, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.06], p < 0.001), equivalent to support decreasing from 50% to 44% (95% CI [41%, 47%]). These findings suggest that public support for policies in a range of domains is sensitive to evidence of their effectiveness, as well as their ineffectiveness.

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This paper outlines the overlap between social psychology, taxation and government spending; an area referred to as ‘fiscal psychology’. Attention is drawn to the tendency of many public economists to ignore the intervening variables between economic stimuli and economic response. These intervening variables are largely attitudinal and could be used to improve economic predictions, understanding of the effects of taxes on work effort, the tendency to evade taxes and more generally, the relationship between taxpayer and government. Fiscal psychology also incorporates familiar approaches in social psychology including equity, intergroup relations, and attribution theory, and debates about attitude structure and the attitudes/behaviour link. Comment is additionally made on the importance of assessing taxpayers' preferences for government spending, and their influence on government fiscal policy as well as their reaction to it. This is done in the light, here as elsewhere, of the discussion as to the ‘descriptive’ or ‘prescriptive’ nature of social psychology in the real world.

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How does unemployment risk affect workers’ support for demanding active labour market policies (ALMPs)? There may be a substantial number of workers who experience unemployment risk from labour market disruptions. Yet, we know less about its impact on demanding ALMP support than the impact of unemployment status. Here, I explore the impact of unemployment risk through automation. Automation-threatened workers’ support for demanding ALMPs may be influenced by two opposing considerations that are linked to their potential reliance on welfare. First, they may worry about barriers to welfare access. Second, they may worry about welfare competition, especially under austerity. Their support for demanding ALMPs would hence depend on which consideration they find to be most salient. Based on the European Social Survey (2016) data on West European countries, I find that automation-threatened workers significantly support such policies. This may indicate that they find welfare competition concerns more salient than welfare access ones.

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We investigate when voters favour social investment. Welfare states have transformed their core policies as a result of low economic growth and fiscal pressures. The social investment strategy, such as broader education provision and promotion of women's employment, aims at shifting the economy from the traditional Keynesian welfare state to the high-productivity economy by encouraging long-term and inclusive human capital formation. Social investment is popular among citizens in many developed economies, especially in the EU where governments promote social investment as part of their welfare policy packages. However, in Japan, the term ‘social investment’ is rarely used in policy discussions. Consequently, we ask what levels of voter support social investment policies have in such an environment; which voter characteristics are associated with social investment support; and whether voter support for social investment differs when placed in a broader policy context. To answer these questions, we conducted an online survey with a conjoint experiment. Our data analysis shows that social investment policies are popular among Japanese people, despite a lack of familiarity with the concept of social investment. We find that social libertarians and female respondents are more likely than social authoritarians and male respondents to support social investment. In addition, there is some evidence that higher income voters are favourable to social investment policies. Furthermore, voter support for social investment depends on the policy context. Support becomes weaker when social investment policies are presented in combination with decreasing levels of social security spending. Our results highlight what kinds of social investment policies could be achieved without damaging electoral fortunes.

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Welfare opinion research has traditionally viewed migration as a potential hazard for welfare solidarity. In this article, we argue that while increased presence of foreigners can indeed make some people less supportive of public welfare provision in general or trigger opposition to migrants’ social rights, the link between migration and solidarity is not universally a negative one. Instead, many people can combine support for migration with high preferences for comprehensive social protection; others can endorse migration while they are not particularly supportive of an all-encompassing welfare state. Based on this line of reasoning we construct a taxonomy of four ideal types of welfare solidarity that are present in contemporary European welfare states. To illustrate the usefulness of this heuristic tool, we apply Latent Class Factor Analysis to European Social Survey round 8 data. We find that the majority of Europeans (56%) combine strong support for both migration and the welfare state (extended solidarity). However, exclusive solidarity is also widely spread as over a quarter of respondents (28%) oppose migration while expressing strong support for the welfare state. People who oppose migration and have relatively low preference for the welfare state (diminished solidarity) represent a small minority (5%). A little more than a tenth (11%) of Europeans endorse migration, but express relatively low support for the welfare state, which we assume to be a reflection of cosmopolitan solidarity. Despite considerable variation in the incidence of the four solidarities across countries, the preference structure is the same for all. Further, we find that at the individual level, the propensity to hold one of these types of solidarities is influenced by social trust, citizenship and country of birth, financial situation, education, and residence type. However, the extent of migration and social spending do not appear to be related with the propensity of holding either type of solidarity as the liberal’s dilemma and the welfare chauvinism theories would predict.

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Government response to public opinion is essential to democratic theory and practice. However, previous research on the relationship between public opinion and government attention predominantly focuses on western societies. Little is known about such relationship in nonwestern or nondemocratic societies. Drawing upon time-series data of public opinion polls and government press releases, this study examines the dynamic relationships between public opinion and government attention in posthandover Hong Kong. The findings reveal that the responsiveness of the Hong Kong government to public opinion varies across issue domains and is constrained by the political power from the central government in Beijing.

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Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demands and needs but also that the public is expected to respond to actual policies and reforms by adjusting their demands. What is often over-looked is that policy-specific knowledge is imperative for public policy responsiveness to send correct signals. By using survey experiments, we tested the effects of policy-specific information on policy preferences for privatization of welfare services in Sweden. In line with the thermostatic model, we expected information on the increase of privatization to show negative correlations with demand for more privatization. The experiments showed that policy preferences changed in most policy areas when policy-specific facts were provided. The negative effects of information about privatization were most pronounced among centre-left respondents, increasing the left-right polarization. The results suggest that policy-specific knowledge can serve as a useful mechanism in order to meet the identified theoretical need to strengthen the causal relationship in theories of public responsiveness. The study adds important knowledge to how we understand public responsiveness, and highlight the need of “reality checks” when analysing policy demands.

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This revised edition features a new afterword, updated through the 2016 election. On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for "Tea Party" protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010. In this penetrating new study, Harvard University's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans. Their opposition to "big government" entails reluctance to pay taxes to help people viewed as undeserving "freeloaders" - including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican Party sharply to the right. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism combines fine-grained portraits of local Tea Party members and chapters with an overarching analysis of the movement's rise, impact, and likely fate.

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Abstract. The transition to the market economy has brought increasing age-related inequalities and diverging access to market-based opportunities. This can be e

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Cultural and economic heterogeneity is often seen as a major threat to modern welfare states. This article contributes to the discussion of how much heterogeneity the welfare state can endure by theoretically and empirically focusing on the relationship between different levels of national identity and the support for welfare state policies. We analyse the effect of different types of national identity on attitudes towards taxation and redistribution. We show that it is the subjective aspect of national identity, or social cohesion, that in fact matters for predicting attitudes to the welfare state. In comparison, more objective measures of heterogeneity like the inequality of income distribution, language fractionalisation or the percentage of foreign-born individuals do not have any effect on attitudes to the welfare state.

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Altruism is an important omitted variable in much of the political economy literature. While material self-interest is the base of most approaches to redistribution (first affecting preferences and then politics and policy), there is a paucity of research on inequality aversion. I propose that other-regarding concerns influence redistribution preferences and that (1) they matter most to those in less material need and (2) they are conditional on the identity of the poor. Altruism is most relevant to the rich, and it is most influential when the recipients of benefits are similar to those financing them. Using data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2012, I will show that group homogeneity magnifies (or limits) the importance of altruism for the rich. In making these distinctions between the poor and the rich, the arguments in this article challenge some influential approaches to inequality, immigration, and voting.

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Scholars have long debated whether welfare policymaking in industrialized democra-cies is responsive to citizen preferences and whether such policymaking is more responsive to rich than to poor citizens. Debate has been hampered, however, by difficulties in matching data on attitudes toward particular policies to data on changes in the generosity of actual policies. This article uses better, more targeted measures of policy change that allow more valid exploration of responsiveness for a significant range of democracies. It does so by linking multicountry and multiwave survey data on attitudes toward health, pension, and unemployment policies and data on actual policy generosity, not just spending, in these domains. The analysis reveal that attitudes correlate strongly with subsequent changes in welfare generosity in the three policy areas and that such responsiveness is much stronger for richer than for poorer citizens. Representation is likely real but also vastly unequal in the welfare politics of industrialized democracies.

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Abstract. Welfare regimes differ in their impact on social inequality in important ways. While previous research has explored the shape of stratification across

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We provide an overview of the field of preferences for redistribution research, including divergent terminological and theoretical approaches. We review the different uses of public attitudes, policy preferences and public opinion. We outline the theoretical roles of material interests, values and opinion-policy endogeneity. We also introduce and summarize the original research presented in this Special Issue. Among the key contributions of the Special Issue to the subfield are novel explorations of how socialization affects preferences for redistribution; an examination of how perceptions about inequality translate into policy preferences; a call for more research into the links between taxation and social policy preferences; explanations for the paradox of low levels of support for redistribution in the famously-generous Nordic countries; and new insights into class-specific policy preferences as well as the roles of immigration and diversity in determining such preferences.

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Following the shift towards an activating role of the European welfare states, there is increasing scholarly interest in public support for demanding activation policies that impose obligations on welfare recipients. Borrowing the classical theoretical frameworks used in welfare attitudes research, we aim to disentangle the effect of self-interest and ideological beliefs on support for demanding activation. Using data from the Belgian National Election Study (2014), we find that support for demanding activation is strongly related to authoritarian dispositions, work ethic and rejection of egalitarianism. For the social-structural variables, we find direct as well as indirect (that is, mediated by the ideological dimensions) effects. Controlling for ideology, social categories that are potentially most affected by welfare obligations – i.e. those currently unemployed, with a previous experience of unemployment and low-income individuals – are more likely to oppose demanding policies, which can be interpreted as a self-interest effect. The effects of educational level, conversely, are primarily mediated and should be understood in terms of ideological preferences rather than self-interest. Our results indicate that, when analysing support for specific welfare policies, attention needs to be paid to the interplay between self-interest and ideological preferences.

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Representative democracies are supposed to be uniquely virtuous in that they ensure that public preferences drive public policy. Dynamic representation is the outcome of a recurring interaction between electorate and parties that can be observed at the macro level. Preferences can shape government policy via two possible mechanisms. ‘Policy accomodation’ suggests that governments respond directly to the electorate’s preferences. ‘Electoral turnover’, on the other hand, assumes that preferences shape policy indirectly. Parties pursue their ideological goals, and public preferences respond ‘thermostatically’ by moving in the opposite direction to policy. This causes voters to switch votes and eventually leads to a turnover of power from one ‘side’ to ‘the other’. In this paper, we estimate preferences for government activity (‘the policy mood’) in Spain between 1978 and 2017. We show that mood responds ‘thermostatically’ to policy. Variations in mood are associated with support for parties. Policy is driven by party control but is not thermostatically responsive to mood. It appears that in Spain – like Britain – dynamic representation can only be achieved by electoral turnover. We consider the implications of this for our understanding of how representation works.

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Does public policy in the United Kingdom respond to changes in public preferences? If so, is this the result of the government changing its policy to reflect preferences (“policy accommodation”) or the result of governments that pursue unpopular policies being replaced at elections by governments more in line with the public (“electoral turnover”)? We explore these questions by estimating annual aggregate public preferences (“the policy mood”) using responses to 287 questions administered 2,087 times and annual policy using budgetary data (“nonmilitary government expenditure”) for the whole of the postwar period. We find that mood moves in the opposite direction to policy and variations in mood are associated with variations in annual vote intentions. Policy is responsive to party control but not directly responsive to mood. Shifts in mood eventually lead to a change in government and thus policy, but this process may be very slow if the public has doubts about the competence of the opposition.

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Some participants of the public debate have argued that the world before and after the coronavirus crisis will look fundamentally different. An underlying assumption is that this crisis will alter public opinion in such a way that it leads to profound societal and political change. Scholarship suggests that while some policy preferences are quite volatile and prone to change under the influence of crises, core values formed during childhood are likely to remain stable. In this article, we test stability or change of a well-selected set of opinions and values before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We rely on a unique longitudinal panel study whereby the Dutch fieldwork of the European Values Study 2017 web survey serves as a baseline; respondents were re-approached in May 2020. The findings indicate that values remain largely stable. However, there is an increase in political support, confirming the so-called rally effect. We conclude our manuscript with a response to the futurists expecting changes in public opinion because of the coronavirus crisis.

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With increasing interest in basic income (BI) in recent years around the world, a precise understanding of public attitudes toward this policy can provide valuable evidence for discussions on its feasibility among scholars and policymakers. This study quantitatively investigates what factors influence public attitudes toward implementing BI, taking the Hokuriku region of Japan as an example. The hypothesis and variables were designed based on the theories of retrenchment and social innovation, and a detailed consideration of the theoretical impacts of BI on human society, and of the social, economic and cultural characteristics of Japan. A questionnaire containing a BI proposal for Japan was developed, then a survey was conducted of 1028 local residents in the Hokuriku region. The logistic regression model was employed for the empirical analysis. The results showed that age, individual income level, family structure and interest in participating in non-market activities tend to influence respondents’ attitudes toward BI, due to concerns about the gains and losses from a trade-off selection between BI and the existing policies that it would replace. From the perspective of individual value, it was also found that the perception of the future vision of a society reshaped by BI also significantly influences public attitudes toward the policy. This research emphasized that the retrenchment of the existing policies accompanied by the implementation of BI lead potential beneficiaries of the current welfare system to weigh the change to their benefits, which consequently forms their attitudes toward BI.

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Do conceptions of just rewards vary with economic development? To investigate this question we use the 1999-2000 “Inequality-III” round of the International Social Science Project together with other data in the World Inequality Study. There are 30 countries and 19 568 individual respondents in the full-time labor force. We measure inequality by the Gini coefficient for the general public's report of the legitimate earnings for their own occupation. OLS and multilevel analyses show patterns of influences very similar to those found in earlier research, with one striking exception. By far the most important influence, not previously documented across so many countries, is the prosperity of the nation: people in poor nations are much more accepting of inequality than are people in prosperous nations. If this cross-sectional pattern reflects developmental trends, as is likely, then it seems that economic development creates equalitarian attitudes. However, true egalitarianism is not held as ideal in any country, and so is not an appropriate goal for public policy. Instead the ideal level of inequality differs among countries. These ideals are a more appropriate benchmark for policy. We suggest that these benchmarks, available here for 150 nations, should be the starting point for future assessments of income inequality.

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Perception of inequality is important for the analysis of individuals' motivations and decisions and for policy assessment. Despite the broad range of analytic gains that it grants, our knowledge about measurement and determinants of perception of inequality is still limited, since it is intrinsically unobservable, multidimensional, and essentially contested. Using a novel econometric approach, we study how observable individual characteristics affect the joint distribution of a set of indicators of perceived inequality in specific domains. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, we shed light on the associations among these indicators and how they are affected by covariates. The approach also gives insights on some results in the literature on inequality. The role of many subjective indicators for the perception of inequality is re-examined and examples of policy applications are reviewed. The importance of our empirical approach to the measurement of perceived inequality is, in so doing, reinforced.

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Views on income inequality and concomitant redistributive preferences are crucial to the design of tax and transfer systems. Although income distribution in Germany, France and Switzerland is very similar, opinions differ widely as to how critically income differences are viewed. This is hardly surprising given that when countries are compared there is almost no connection between the actual distribution of incomes and subjective evaluations of income differentials. In fact, many nationalities assume that the structure of their society is considerably less equitable than it really is. Thus, a factor which far better explains views on distribution is the subjective perception of inequality within a society. Similarly, redistributive preferences are influenced less by actual distribution than by perceived inequality.

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This article argues that public opinion regarding the legitimacy of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are (perceived to be) high, the public thinks of larger income inequality as legitimate. The phenomenon is explained by the system justification motivation and other psychological processes that advantage existing social arrangements. Three experiments show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect which income differences are thought of as legitimate. A fourth experiment shows that the system justification motivation is a cause of this effect. These results can provide an empirical basis for future studies to assume that the public reacts to inequality with adapted expectations, not increased demands for redistribution.

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A vast literature suggests that economic inequality has important consequences for politics and public policy. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in dictatorships. Most such arguments crucially assume that ordinary people know how high inequality is, how it has been changing, and where they fit in the income distribution. Using a variety of large, cross-national surveys, we show that, in recent years, ordinary people have had little idea about such things. What they think they know is often wrong. Widespread ignorance and misperceptions emerge robustly, regardless of data source, operationalization, and measurement method. Moreover, perceived inequality—not the actual level—correlates strongly with demand for redistribution and reported conflict between rich and poor. We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be reframed as theories about effects of perceived inequality.

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This paper investigates the link between inequality and demand for redistribution by looking at how individuals form their perceptions of inequality. Most of the literature analyzing demand for redistribution has focused on objective inequality, rather than subjective perceptions of inequality. However, a model that links demand for redistribution to subjective inequality is needed given that recent empirical research has shown a growing gap between subjective and objective inequality. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey we focus on explaining individuals’ formation of inequality perceptions using objective variables and we then study the relationship between these perceptions and their demand for redistribution. We find that objective macro variables are associated to individual perceptions of inequality and that individual circumstances, some of which relate to self-interest, like age, educational attainment, and income play also an important role. Perceptions of equality, in turn, are significatively correlated to demand for redistribution and seem to substitute for any effect of objective variables. This result suggests that contextual macro variables only affect individuals’ demand for redistribution through their perceptions of equality and don’t have a direct effect.

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Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.

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In recent years, several international-comparative studies have analyzed the relationship between migration and native populations' decreasing support for redistributive policies. However, these studies use cross-sectional designs and aggregate the number of foreign-born residents at the national level. Both aspects are theoretically and methodologically problematic. We address these shortcomings by investigating cross-sectional as well as longitudinal effects in the case of Germany, using a combination of individual- and regional-level data for several time points from 1994 to 2010. Our results suggest that native-born populations become more reluctant to support welfare programs when the proportion of foreigners at the regional level increases. This effect is particularly strong in the initial phase of immigration, and it is further moderated by the economic context: the higher the unemployment rate, the more negative is the effect of foreigners on natives' attitude toward providing welfare.

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The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that th...

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Britain was a pioneer in launching a modern welfare state. Before World War I, it instituted workers' compensation, old age pensions, health insurance, and the world's first compulsory system of unemployment insurance. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had expanded Civil War pensions into de facto old age and disability pensions for many working- and middle-class Americans. However, during the Progressive Era, as the Civil War generation died off, the United States failed to institute modern pensions and social insurance. Conventional theories of welfare-state development-theories emphasizing industrialization, liberal values, and demands by the organized industrial working class-cannot sufficiently account for these contrasting British and U.S. patterns. Instead, a macropolitical explanation is developed. By the early twentieth century, Britain had a strong civil service and competing, programmatically oriented political parties. Patronage politics had been overcome, and political leaders and social elites were willing to use social spending as a way to appeal to working-class voters. However, the contemporary United States lacked an established civil bureaucracy and was embroiled in the efforts of Progressive reformers to create regulatory agencies and policies free of the "political corruption" of nineteenth-century patronage democracy. Modern social-spending programs were neither governmentally feasible nor politically acceptable at this juncture in U.S. political history.

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This article uses the social definitional process approach to understand the making of the 1967 Montana Clean Air Act. This approach holds that it is how the various competing social groups define the objective situation (air pollution) as problematic and then act on these definitions that counts. Based on their cultural meanings of the problem, the competing groups engage in claims-making activities that they seek to have legitimated in law. In the struggle for the legitimation of the various competing definitions, the groups attempt to claim ownership (disownership) as well as to assign causal and political responsibility for the problem. In Montana it was the clean air forces who were able to have their cultural meanings legitimated in law and who placed causal responsibility for air pollution on industrial capital and political responsibility for solving the problem on the Montana State Board of Health.

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Abstract. Aiming to increase our understanding of how the power of financiers is constrained by social controls, this paper examines the capacity of “market fa

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Using a theoretical framework that stresses political institutions, we examine the consolidation of income-security programs during the formation of the welfare state around the turn of the century. Boolean analyses and ancillary historical materials indicate distinct routes to consolidation of social insurance programs. A "Bismarckian" path centers on strategic co-optive responses of patriarchal states and state elites to working-class mobilization. A second path, a "Lib-Lab" route, centers on strategic incorporation of labor parties and/or unions into governing Liberal coalitions. A possible third path involves reforms by Catholic parties governing patriarchal, unitary states confronting working-class challenges. The virtual absence of leftist governments before the Great Depression has challenged claims for major impacts of the working class on welfare-state formation through the 1920s. However, we find that mobilization of the working class was integral to each conjuncture that generated the adoption of social security programs during the 1880-1930 period. Worker mobilization combined with such varied and distinctly state institutions as patriarchal states and Liberal party governments in ways that advanced welfare states.

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Economic inequality, actual or perceived, plays an important role in influencing the set of goods and services that are subsidized by the public sector. Public expenditures on defense, police and fire services, roads, foreign aid, or research and development may (or may not) have benefits for all citizens. However, except for those directly employed in these activities, such expenditures do not directly affect the well-being of households. In this chapter, we focus on public expenditures that provide income or goods and services directly to households. This implies that we are primarily concerned with public expenditure on the provision of ‘private goods,’ including cash and near-cash transfers.1

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Our paper empirically evaluates the magnitude of the disparities across European countries and American divisions in the demand for redistribution in the 2000's. We identify which are the individual characteristics and the contextual variables that contribute the most in predicting the observed different support for redistribution. We model demand for redistribution in a multilevel framework that provides a natural and suitable model for accounting different levels of variation, at individual level and at macro level, simultaneously.

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Comparative research that relies on sampling procedures has to deal with the problem of validity and reliability of estimates derived from a chosen sample. Social scientists are not only interested in level estimates such as mean values, but also in (causal) effects estimates as in regression type models. Thus, estimates based on these theoretical explanatory models also underlie the problems of validity and reliability. Usually researchers deal with one sample for each study of interest and implicitly rely on the adequacy of the reported parameters. In cases, where the researcher have the chance to control the whole sampling and data cleaning procedures, i.e. the field of primary data generating research, this paper will not add much at first hand. In other cases, where the researcher relies on secondary data sources that are available publicly or by other contracts, the researcher cannot control the sampling and data cleaning process ex posteriori. This problem becomes specifically important in cross-national research but may also be applied to other fields. This contribution is targeted at applied researchers to realize an easily accessible method for cross-validation based on actual empirical data, i.e. it does not make use of artificially created data and does not involve complex algorithms (cf. application in Beckers 2008). In cross-national survey research, which is the research field of application discussed here, the aim is to compare countries in order to gain knowledge about both similarities and differences and the generalities and specificities of social mechanisms (Meulemann 2002; 2008; 2009).

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Existing research has found that individuals often perceive healthcare inequalities as unfair; yet, there is high variation in unfairness perceptions between countries. This raises the question of whether the institutional context of the healthcare system is associated with what people perceive as just. Using data from the ISSP study and OECD health expenditure data from 2011/13, we explore whether individual attitudes about the unfairness of healthcare inequality – the ability to purchase “better” healthcare for the affluent – vary systematically with a country’s institutional environment: namely, with the prevalence of cost barriers to healthcare access, and with the degree and type of public healthcare financing. Three general findings emerge from the analysis: (1) Higher cost barriers correlate with lower levels of perceived unfairness in healthcare inequality, suggesting those exposed to greater levels of inequality tend to be more accepting of inequality. This finding is consistent with empirical justice theory and the expected relevance of an ‘existential’ standard of justice, stemming from individuals’ proclivities to accept the status quo as just. (2) Further, greater public financing of healthcare correlates with higher perceived unfairness. Drawing on neo-institutionalist theory, this may suggest that greater public financing enshrines access to healthcare as a universal right, and hence provides an ideational framing that delegitimizes unequal opportunities for purchasing better healthcare. (3) Further, higher unfairness perceptions of lower income and educational groups are more strongly associated with greater public financing than those of their respective comparison groups. This may indicate that the normative right to healthcare is of particular importance to the disadvantaged, which could potentially explain the political quiescence on healthcare of lower income and educated persons in societies that lack universal health systems. In sum, this study contributes to the larger debate on the interrelatedness of healthcare institutions and public opinion, and specifically on perceptions of injustice.

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During the Depression, the Townsend movement enjoyed varied success in seeking pensions for the aged. Social-movement models predict that success depends on the mobilization of resources or on collective action. Other theories predict that economic or political conditions cause the emergence of movements and changes in public spending. The political mediation model used here holds that, to succeed, a movement must reinforce political action with strong organization of members under favorable political conditions. This article defines "success" and employs various analytical and empirical strategies, including qualitative comparative analysis on state level data, to appraise the models. Although each perspective has some support, the political mediation model offers the best explanation of the patterns of successes. The state and the political party system determine whether mobilization and action benefit a constituency and win acceptance for a movement organization.

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This study seeks to find out how social welfare policy preferences have changed over time and what factors account for those preferences in Latvia. The author analyses ISSP survey data gathered in 1996, 2007 and 2016. The data analysis shows that most Latvians still support government interventions in providing social welfare. However, economic factors like material wellbeing and self-interest have decreased the overall support for social welfare policies during the last 20 years. The article provides a long-term perspective missing in previous studies on social welfare policy preferences in Eastern Europe.

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Abstract. This article integrates research on political psychology with welfare state development of social provisions aimed at mollifying unemployment and oth

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This paper focuses on recent developments in ‘ideal-typical’ welfare analysis, including findings on East Asia, Eastern Central Europe and, for the first time, Latin America. The characteristics of a new ideal-typical welfare regime in large parts of Latin America are singled out, looking at key features of major welfare state systems.

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Recent studies of attitudes toward economic inequality suggest that most people around the world prefer very low levels of inequality, despite well-known trends toward greater inequality within many countries. Even within countries, people across the political spectrum are said to be in remarkable agreement about the ideal level of economic inequality. Using survey data from 40 countries and a novel survey experiment in the United States, we show that this apparent agreement is illusory. When relying on a widely used cross-national survey measure of Ideal Pay Ratios, preferred levels of inequality are heavily influenced by two well-documented sources of perceptual distortion: the anchoring effect and ratio bias. These effects are substantial and many times larger than the influence of fundamental political predispositions. As a result, these cross-national survey measures tapping preferences regarding economic inequality produce misleading conclusions about desired levels of inequality.

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Scholars in several social science disciplines scholars have argued from their respective disciplinary perspectives that income inequality has a considerable impact on economic and social performance of a nation. This essay investigates the possible impact of income inequality on 290 values and attitudes in forty industrial nations from an economic perspective. The results show that inequality has a significant impact on values and attitudes especially concerning religion and the family.

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In the wake of rising levels of income inequality during the past two decades, widespread concerns emerged about the social and political consequences of the widening gap between the poor and the rich that can be observed in many established democracies. Several empirical studies substantiate the link between macro-level income inequality and political attitudes and behavior, pointing at its broad and negative implications for political equality. Accordingly, these implications are expected to be accentuated in contexts of high inequality, as is the case in Latin America. Despite these general concerns about the consequences of income inequality, few studies have accounted for the importance of individual perceptions of distributive fairness in regard to trust in political institutions. Even less is known about the extent to which distributive fairness perceptions co-vary with objective indicators of inequality. Moreover, the research in this area has traditionally focused on OECD countries, which have lower indexes of inequality than the rest of the world. This study aims at filling this gap by focusing on the relevance of distributive fairness perceptions and macro-level inequality for political trust and on how these two levels interact in Latin American countries. The analyses are based on the Latinobarometer survey 2011, which consists of 18 countries. Multilevel estimations suggest that both dimensions of inequality are negatively associated with political trust but that higher levels of macro-level inequality attenuate rather than increase the strength of the negative association between distributive fairness perceptions and political trust.

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Does immigration reduce natives’ support for the welfare state? Evidence from the European Social Survey (2002/2003) suggests a more qualified relation. For Europe as a whole, there is only weak evidence of a negative association between the perceived presence of immigrants and natives’ support for the welfare state. However, this weak average relationship masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. We distinguish two channels through which immigration could affect natives’ support for the welfare state: a pure dislike of immigrants and concerns about the economic consequences of immigration. We find that natives who hold both negative views react much more negatively to a given perceived share of immigrants than natives who hold neither view. However, there is no clear pattern concerning the relative importance of the two channels. Finally, we find that natives who hold either of these negative views of immigrants tend to be less supportive of the welfare state independently of the perceived presence of immigrants.

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In this article, we examine the impact of multicultural immigration policy on the degree to which immigration reduces support for redistributive social policy among natives. Arguments linking immigration to support for redistributive social policy are hotly contested. Some suggest that immigration reduces support for social policy, while others suggest that it increases such support. To make matters worse, the empirical evidence is equally mixed. We take this confluence as a puzzle in need of explanation. Our point of departure is to introduce institutional context and multicultural immigration policy, in particular, as a key intervening factor. From the growing literature on multiculturalism, we derive three unique hypotheses by which immigration has different effects on native support for redistributive social policy across multicultural contexts. To subject these to empirical scrutiny, we examine the degree to which the effect of immigration on native support for redistributive social policy (regarding jobs, unemployment, income, retirement, housing, and healthcare) varies across multicultural context. Our findings suggest that immigration flows appear to positively affect support for social policy in countries with a high degree of multiculturalism. For some types of social policy, immigration flows actually increase support for social policy in highly multicultural countries but reduces such support in assimilationist countries. However, cross-national variation in immigrant stocks is uncorrelated with support for social policy regardless of the level of multiculturalism. We conclude by highlighting how our findings point to the need for more research on how multiculturalism impacts native perceptions of immigrants.

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In the reform of the welfare state, countries' experiences depend not only on their economics, institutions, and policy responses but also on politics, that is, on governments' ability to gain agreement for reform through discourse, understood as both a set of ideas and an interactive process. This article seeks to show not only how discourse matters but also when it matters, that is, when it acts as a causal influence on welfare reform, altering perceptions of interests and overcoming institutional obstacles to change. It demonstrates this through the examination of three matched sets of cases in which the presence of a coherent discourse contributed to the success of welfare state reform and its absence contributed to its failure. The matched pairs are Britain and New Zealand, the Netherlands and Germany, and Italy and France.

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By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/ policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost two thousand survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans. The vast discrepancy I find in government responsiveness to citizens with different incomes stands in stark contrast to the ideal of political equality that Americans hold dear. Although perfect political equality is an unrealistic goal, representational biases of this magnitude call into question the very democratic character of our society.

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This study analyses congruence across various issues in 16 European democracies. Making use of public opinion and expert survey data, our analyses show that congruence between the policy preferences of citizens and the stances of governments is much more complex than what is revealed by studies focusing on ideology solely. Size and directions of incongruence are larger and more systematic on specific issues than on the left–right scale. On redistribution, citizens are more to the left than their governments, while popular support for European integration is systematically lower among citizens than among their representatives. Moreover, the relatively poor are particularly underrepresented on redistribution, while the preferences of the relatively lower educated are not well reflected in government preferences in relation to European integration. We interpret these results as being partly linked to a representation gap with privileged social groups enjoying higher levels of congruence with their government.

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Abstract. Based on analysis of cross-country and over-time patterns in affluent countries in the late 1980s and the 1990s, Brooks and Manza contend that public

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Scholars have long recognized that equality in policy responsiveness is potentially undermined by the existence of economic inequality. However, there is still a lack of empirical research testing whether and how this actually occurs, especially outside of the USA. This study takes up the question whether unequal representation also exists in a country that is in some ways a least-likely case, namely the Netherlands. It does so by linking public opinion to policy on 291 potential policy changes between 1979 and 2012. This reveals, first, that policy responsiveness is much stronger for high incomes than for low or median incomes. Second, an exploration of the underlying causal mechanisms finds support for the role of political participation of wealthier versus poorer citizens, while the socioeconomic background of parliamentarians relative to the broader public does not seem to matter. Corporate lobbying may also contribute to unequal responsiveness.

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In many Western democracies, ethnic and racial minorities have demanded, and sometimes achieved, greater recognition and accommodation of their identities. This is reflected in the adoption of multiculturalism policies for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy and languagerights for national minorities, and the recognition of land claims and self-government rights for indigenous peoples. These claims for recognition have been controversial, in part because of fears that they make it more difficult to sustain a robust welfare state by eroding the interpersonal trust,social solidarity and political coalitions that sustain redistribution. Are these fears of a conflict between a "politics of recognition" and a "politics of redistribution" valid?This volume is the first systematic attempt to empirically test this question, using both cross-national statistical analyses of the relationships among diversity policies, public attitudes and the welfare state, and case studies of the recognition/ redistribution linkage in the political coalitionsin particular countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and in Latin America. These studies suggest that that there is no general or inherent tendency for recognition to undermine redistribution, and that the relationship between these two forms of politics canbe supportive as well as competitive, depending on the context. These findings shed important light, not only on the nature and effects of multiculturalism, but also on wider debates about the social and political foundations of the welfare state, and indeed about our most basic concepts ofcitizenship and national identity.As a ground-breaking attempt to connect the literatures on multiculturalism and the welfare state, this volume will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars and practitioners who work on issues of ethnocultural diversity and social policy.

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This article examines the relationships between socioeconomic status and attitudes toward redistributive taxation across 33 countries using the complete International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 data set. We apply a simple rational-choice-inspired homo-economicus hypothesis proposing that those better off in the socioeconomic hierarchy should have less reason to support state-organized economic redistribution compared to those situated at lower levels in the socioeconomic hierarchy. The empirical results demonstrate substantial cross-country variation regarding the correspondence between empirical observations and theoretical expectations. When faced with such tremendous cross-national variation in response patterns, a common strategy among researchers is to question the quality of the data collection procedures for those countries deviating strongly from theoretical expectations. The strategy chosen in this study is, however, different. The main argument is that an observed lack of fit between theory and empirical observations may be rooted in problems related to theory rather than the quality of data collection procedures. Building on previous research, two “cultural distance” hypotheses are formulated, both of which argue that the correspondence between the homo-economicus theory and empirics should indeed vary systematically across countries. The first focuses on the role of the welfare state and the second on the level of economic affluence and associated scientific dominance. Both hypotheses receive considerable empirical support. The relationship between socioeconomic status and support for redistributive taxation is substantially stronger in the wealthy Western welfare states—particularly among those of Northern Europe—than in the poor non-Western countries lacking any institutional design reminiscent of a welfare state.

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The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) raised the issue as to what extent the new member states would follow in the policy footsteps of the old member states rather than taking the United States as their role model. Drawing a polemical distinction between “old” and “new Europe”, a former U.S. secretary of defense suggested that the Central and Eastern European countries might adhere more closely to the United States as the superpower that helped end their dependence upon the Soviet Empire. This chapter examines to what extent patterns of political participation differ between the United States and Europe, and where exactly the new member states fit in this comparison. It shows that electoral turnout is higher and less socially skewed in Western Europe than in the United States. The higher inclusiveness of the (Western) European State(s) fosters political integration and the equality of electoral participation. Differences between Europe and America diminish considerably when the analysis is confined to the pensioner generation, whose integration into welfare state schemes is largely similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

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This paper sets out to explore the Australian instance of a significant international problem: Intergenerational solidarity and the willingness of younger generations to support the future care of older people. It draws on Bengston’s intergenerational solidarity theory, in particular his conception of normative solidarity relative to filial obligations, to analyse data from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes. This data demonstrates evidence of intergenerational solidarity at the policy level and a need for a continued role for government in the provision of residential care, insurance schemes, and the payment of income to full time and occasional carers. At the family level there is less support for the role of adult children in the payment of formal care or the provision of informal care. There is also a significant difference between men and women concerning the direct provision of informal care to ageing parents. Suggestions for future research are highlighted.

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This article argues that communitarianism, as the prevalent citizenship paradigm in the Philippines, observable also in modest expectations towards government services among Filipinos and a high emphasis on individual and community action, can be used to explain the lack of political change in the Philippines. In its first part, the article presents data on the sense of citizenship and concepts of social rights and obligations among Filipinos by combining findings from a series of problem-centered interviews with young urban professionals and quantitative data collected within annual surveys by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on government, social inequality, and citizenship. The second part of the article attributes these findings to everyday concepts of citizenship as ideal-typical state responsibility theories and modern citizenship paradigms. By including ethnographic data, it discovers significant traits of communitarianism in Philippine everyday life. This section goes on to present how communitarianism (with its inherent character of exclusivity) impedes a democratic culture and moreover, how it is unable to serve as a guiding social philosophy in unifying a large-scale society mainly consisting of citizens who are strangers (ibang tao) to each other. Nevertheless, in conclusion, the article suggests the possibility of deepening and broadening the sense of citizenship in the Philippine society and its respect for the stranger by drawing on elements of Filipino culture.

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How do economic recessions influence attitudes toward redistribution of wealth? From a traditional economic self-interest perspective, attitudes toward redistribution should be affected by one’s financial standing. A functional evolutionary approach suggests another possible form of self-interest: That during periods of economic threat, attitudes toward redistribution should be influenced by one’s mate-value—especially for men. Using both lab-based experiments and real-world data on voting behavior, we consistently find that economic threats lead low mate-value men to become more prosocial and supportive of redistribution policies, but that the same threats lead high mate-value men to do the opposite. Economic threats do not affect women’s attitudes toward redistribution in the same way, and, across studies, financial standing is only weakly associated with attitudes toward redistribution. These findings suggest that during tough economic times, men’s attitudes toward redistribution are influenced by something that has seemingly little to do with economic self-interest—their mating psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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Abstract. This article examines the determinants of variations in welfare state attitudes between Germany, Norway, and the United States. Besides the influence

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Democratic accountability requires that the public be reasonably well-informed about what policymakers actually do. Such a public would adjust its preferences for "more" or "less" policy in response to policy outputs themselves. In effect, the public would behave like a thermostat; when the actual policy "temperature" differs from the preferred policy temperature, the public would send a signal to adjust policy accordingly, and once sufficiently adjusted, the signal would stop. In domains where policy is clearly defined and salient to the public, changes in the public's preferences for more policy activity are negatively related to changes in policy. A thermostatic model of American public preferences for spending on defense and a set of five social programs is developed and then tested using time series regression analysis. Changes in public preferences for more spending reflect changes in both the preferred levels of spending and spending decisions themselves. Most importantly, changes in preferences are negatively related to spending decisions, whereby the public adjusts its preferences for more spending downward (upward) when appropriations increase (decrease). Thus, consistent with the Eastonian model, policy outputs do "feed back" on public inputs, at least in the defense spending domain and across a set of social spending domains.

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This study investigates how support for Social Europe is related to citizens’ welfare attitudes. On the one hand, welfare attitudes can spill over from the national to the European level, given that Social Europe aims to achieve similar goals to those of national welfare states. On the other hand, support for the welfare state can be an obstacle, if citizens perceive the nation state and the European Union as competing or substituting governance levels. Using data from the 2014 Belgian National Election Study, we take a multidimensional approach to Social Europe, capturing attitudes toward social regulations, member state solidarity, European social citizenship, and a European social security system. Results demonstrate that citizens who are more positive about the welfare state are also more supportive of Social Europe. However, positive welfare attitudes do not affect all dimensions of Social Europe to the same extent. The spillover effect of support for basic welfare state principles is strongest for policy instruments of Social Europe that are less intrusive to national welfare states (EU social regulations). By contrast, welfare state critique has a stronger impact on support for more intrusive instruments (European social citizenship).

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The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.Author names are in alphabetical order and they share equal responsibility for the manuscript. Early versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the Nordic Political Science Association in Aalborg, 2002, and the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 28 meeting in Mannheim, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 19 meeting in Tilburg 2000, and the American Sociological Association in Washington, DC, 2000, as well as at various seminars. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript we thank Rainer Lepsius, Anders Lindbom, Ingalill Montanari, John Myles, Michael Shalev, Sheila Shaver, and Robin Stryker, as well as other participants in these meetings. We want to thank Olof Bäckman, Stefan Englund, Ingrid Esser, Helena Höög, and Annita Näsström for very valuable help and Dennis Quinn for providing us his data on international financial deregulation. Our thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for careful reading. This research has been supported by grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennial Foundation and the Swedish Council for Social Research.

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To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters’ preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a person's ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a “ceiling effect.” However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals’ employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters’ social policy preferences.

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Abstract. Whether people believe that tax burdens are fairly distributed is an important condition for welfare state legitimacy. This article examines how peop

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Social scientists often work with theories of reciprocal causality. Sometimes theories suggest that reciprocal causes work simultaneously, or work on a time-scale small enough to make them appear simultaneous. Researchers may employ simultaneous feedback modelsto investigate such theories, although the practice is rare in cross-sectional survey research. This paper discusses the certain conditions that make these models possible if not desirable using such data. This methodological excursus covers the construction of simultaneousfeedback models using a structural equation modeling perspective. This allows the researcher to test if a simultaneous feedback theory fits survey data, test competing hypotheses and engage in macro-comparisons. This paper presents methods in a manner and language amenable to the practicing social scientist who is not a statistician or matrix mathematician. It demonstrates how to run models using three popular software programs (MPlus, Stata and R), and an empirical example using International Social Survey Program data.

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Many economic and social conditions shape public welfare spending. We are able to show, however, that after taking account of these conditions, the expressed left-right preferences of the median voters significantly affect comparative welfare spending. These new findings support the representational claims of liberal democracy and the theoretical expectations of the literature on ideological congruence. However, we also show that insofar as the preferences of citizens and the promises of governing parties (which are highly correlated,) can be disentangled, it is the former that affect the long-term redistributive welfare spending equilibrium, while the latter have small, but significant short-term effects. Surprisingly, despite greater representational correspondence between positions of voters and governments under PR than SMD, the impact of the median voter preferences is quite similar under the two systems.

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Abstract. Our understanding of cross-national differences in the relationship between social class location and voting choices has improved substantially in th

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Much research shows that politicians represent public preferences in public policy. Although we know that there is representation, we do not understand the nature of the relationship in different policy areas. We do not know whether and to what extent representation varies across domains. Even where we find representation, we do not know what policy makers actually represent. This article explicitly addresses these issues, focusing on a set of nine spending domains in the United States. At the heart of the article is a simple conjecture: representation varies across domains, and the pattern is symmetrical to the pattern of public responsiveness to budgetary policy itself. Analysis of the relationships between opinion and policy over time in the different spending domains supports the conjecture. The patterns fit quite nicely with what we know about the influence of different issues on voting behavior in American national elections. Based on this analysis, then, it appears that politicians' responsiveness to public preferences reflects the public importance of different policy domains.

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Many studies to date regarding public support for welfare-state programs do not have an adequate theoretical model and fail to consider differences in public support for contributory vs. means-tested programs. Moreover, these studies seldom take into account cross-cultural variations. This study presents and tests the validity of a three-tier model in which socio-economic variables influence social ideologies which, in turn, differentially affect support for contributory and means-tested programs. Using comparable data from two countries — Israel and the United States — a path analysis with log-linear models is applied, indicating that, while important cross-cultural differences exist, the model is generally confirmed.

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Alternative theories of the linkage process between mass policy preferences and public policies are tested empirically. Opinion-policy linkage may arise because mass preferences drive the policy process, elite preferences drive the process, or because of a shared-preferences, reciprocal influence process. Policy linkage may also be facilitated by higher voter mobilization and party competition. A multiple-equation model of the opinion-policy process in the United States is tested with two-stage least squares regression. The state policy process is best explained by an opinion-sharing, reciprocal influence model. Shared partisanship, party competition, and voter mobilization enhance the linkage process in theoretically anticipated ways.

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This paper analyses the effect of macroeconomic and social conditions on the demand for redistribution. Using a synthetic cohort design to generate panel data a...

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A recurring problem in political analysis is to link public opinion to public policy. Public opinion has often come to mean the replies to structured questions in representative surveys. The task of connecting opinion and policy is complicated by the difficulty in interpreting replies to these surveys. The burgeoning literature on public opinion and the crisis of the welfare state has failed to provide a consistent account of what aspects of policy might be driven by public demand or vice versa. The interpretations of survey data are either misleading or highly selective. This applies to two crucial areas, attitudes towards poor minorities and opinions about state and private welfare. In order to provide a better understanding of the problems of linking policy and opinion and to offer some guiding principles for research in this area, this paper attempts to clarify some of these difficulties.

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Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosity of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. This paper tests whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the experiment of German separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic system. We find that, after German reunification, East Germans are more in favor of state intervention than West Germans. This effect is especially strong for older cohorts. We further find that East Germans' preferences converge toward those of West Germans. It will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely. (JEL D12, D72, H11, H23, P26)

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Preferences for redistribution and social spending are correlated with income and unemployment risk, but it is unclear how these relationships come about. I build a theory emphasizing that only large changes in economic circumstances provide the information and motivation needed for people to change their preferences. Stable long-run preferences are shaped mainly by early socialization, which includes economic and ideological influences from the family, and early labor market experiences. Enduring shocks, low intergenerational mobility and the tendency of left-wing parents to be poorer generate correlations between circumstances and preferences. Because preferences are stable, greater inequality may not increase aggregate support for redistribution. Support is found for the theory with panel data from Switzerland, using a range of empirical tests.

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The literature addressing attitudes about social policy and the welfare state has been telling us for decades that welfare interventions are supported by those individuals who benefit from a specific measure. The diffusion of ‘demanding’ active labour market policies (ALMPs), however, challenges this relationship. Using a novel dataset, I analyse which individual- and country-level factors explain public support for demanding ALMPs in five Western European countries. The results show that labour market risk and ideological orientation influence public attitudes towards these ALMPs. Thereby, unemployed individuals sympathising with the political right are more strongly opposed to demanding measures than employed individuals with the same political preferences. Moreover, aggregate support is found to be correlated with the country's ALMP legacy, varying from high levels in Germany and the UK to low levels in Denmark and France. The findings suggest that most ALMPs are in fact implemented despite the opposition of their beneficiaries.

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In recent years, many countries have faced pressure to cut the costs of the welfare state, and different strategies have been utilized to achieve this, including stricter eligibility requirements, reduced level of benefits, and reduced maximum duration of benefits. This contribution reports the results from a Norwegian survey designed to measure which of these strategies the general population would prefer in a situation where the government has to tighten various social security schemes. For a given reduction in total costs, there is a trade-off between the desire to avoid large individual benefit reductions and the desire to protect some groups of benefit recipients from any cuts. Different preferences for how to retrench the welfare state will reflect how individuals trade off these concerns. We find a striking association between political affiliation and preferred retrenchment strategy. Right-wingers typically prefer to tighten the eligibility criteria, while left-wingers typically prefer to reduce the benefit level. Furthermore, our results indicate that labor market outsiders are less in favor of tightening the eligibility criteria, but more in favor of reducing the maximum duration of benefits, than labor market insiders. This article contributes to the literature on welfare state retrenchment by examining which retrenchment strategy that the public prefers, which in turn sheds light on which measures that are likely to receive popular support from different demographics in the population.

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This study is one of the first to look at migrants' attitudes towards formal childcare, and the first one to do so by means of international comparison. The social investment strategy of the EU have, among other things, focused on expanding formal childcare to improve female participation in the labor market and to include children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The strategy has received a lot of positive public response, but the success of it hinges on support from the groups it targets, which includes migrants. We therefore tested whether migrants themselves share this positive view of the strategy. Using unique data from the survey “Migrants'he main control variables for each migrant group and th Welfare State Attitudes” (MIFARE), we compared the attitudes of nine migrant groups in three countries (The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany) with those of the native populations. We analyzed data in three different dimensions of attitudes towards childcare: (1) attitudes towards the organization of childcare (formal vs. informal), (2) attitudes towards public spending on childcare and (3) satisfaction with the provision of childcare. Drawing on theories concerning the effects of self-interest, gender values and country of origin, we postulated several hypotheses as to why migrants might differ from natives in their attitudes towards childcare. We found for the Netherlands and Denmark that migrants are less in favour of formal childcare than natives, though at the same time they ask for more public childcare spending and are more satisfied with the formal childcare provided than the native population. Results for Germany were more mixed. We also found that attitudes to formal childcare in the country of origin explain most of the attitude gaps between migrants and natives.

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Abstract. A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the

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In spite of the fact that political eras in the United States are widely (and often ambiguously) defined in terms of a general policy sentiment or mood, political scientists have done little in the way of rigorous analysis regarding this subject. I argue that shifts in domestic policy sentiment along a liberal–conservative continuum may be understood in part as responses to changing economic expectations. Specifically, expectations of a strong economy result in greater support for liberal domestic policies, whereas anticipation of declining economic conditions pushes the national policy mood to the right. Using quarterly data for the period 1968–88, I present a multiple-time-series error correction model that lends considerable support to the hypothesis.

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Abstract. Data from seven Swedish Election Studies were analyzed to test three hypotheses about aggregate public opinion. Various facets of public opinion, inc

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This paper examines whether public attitudes to economic inequality differ in the USA and Europe or whether the more important difference lies in attitudes to the appropriate role of government in changing inequality, using International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data on 11 countries from the ISSP “Social Inequality” modules (1987, 1992, 1999 and 2009). In all countries, the vast majority of respondents agree that “income differences are too large”. The ISSP questions on what a corporate CEO and an unskilled factory worker “do earn” and what they “should earn” indicate that respondents generally underestimate the size of current earnings gaps, particularly in the U.S., but the “should earn” ratio is far below actual earnings differentials in all countries. There is no evidence of a simple USA / Europe difference in average preferences for aggregate economic (in) equality, but the most recent data shows evidence for: (1) more dispersion in attitudes among Americans (which is consistent with recent United States voting behavior and opinion polling); (2) a similar distribution of preferences in the USA, Great Britain and Germany for “leveling down” of the top of the earnings distribution – which contrasts with the stronger consensus in Scandinavia and in the transition economies for wage compression.

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Social health care systems are inevitably confronted with the scarcity of resources and the resulting distributional challenges. Since prioritization implies distributional effects, decisions regarding respective rules should take citizens’ preferences into account. In this study we concentrate on two distributive issues in the German health system: firstly, we analyze the acceptance of prioritizing decisions concerning the treatment of certain patient groups, in this case patients who all need a heart operation. We focus on the patient criteria smoking behavior, age and whether the patient has or does not have young children. Secondly, we investigate Germans’ opinions towards income-dependent health services. The results reveal the strong effects of individuals’ attitudes regarding general aspects of the health system on priorities, e.g. that individuals with an unhealthy lifestyle should not be prioritized. In addition, experience of limited access to health services is found to have a strong influence on citizens’ attitudes, too. Finally, decisions on different prioritization criteria are found to be not independent.

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This paper summarizes the main empirical findings on the determinants of individual attitudes toward governmental redistribution of income. Using data from national and international surveys, recent studies have shown that traditional pecuniary incentives are just one - and not always the strongest - factor that shapes individual preferences for redistribution. Altruism, status seeking, and beliefs in the fairness of market outcomes constitute additional forces shaping preferences. The current paper also provides a novel investigation of the German case, based on survey data collected in 1992 and 1999. Our empirical analysis reveals that governmental redistribution of income has lost substantial support during that period. People in the eastern part of Germany are more prone to support redistribution than their westgerman counterparts; however, their attitudes seem to be converging toward those of westgerman citizens.

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Impact exerted by income inequality on happiness and etatist (interventionist) versus liberal (pro free-market) economic attitudes are analyzed. Income inequality in different countries reduces happiness, understood as public satisfaction with material standard of living and with life as a whole. The results suggest also that income inequality, measured by GINI coefficients, calculated for representative samples of both sub-national (regional) and national populations, decreases public support for saving on social programs and increases public support for economic intervention by the governments. Two kinds of multi-level regression analysis (individual and national as well as individual and regional) bring similar results in this respect.

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In the majority of studies devoted to social capital issues little attention has been paid to questions of parameter heterogeneity (Durlauf and Fafchamps, 2003) and local effects of determinants. To cope with this, we study the determinants of social capital using individual data and allowing for parameter heterogeneity. The model used in this paper is an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) one which uses the Neuro-Coefficient Smooth Transition Auto-Regressive (NCSTAR) model as latent regression. It will give a vector of estimates for each observation of the sample as a nonlinear function of its geographical position and other variables. Its outputs could be considered as the posterior probabilities associated to each modality of the dependent. We showed that allowing for parameter heterogeneity improves considerably the fit of the estimated model relatively to the multinomial logit model which gives global parameter estimates. Moreover, a regional pattern emerges for the estimated coefficients which encourages the public action at this level. Conversely to the Knack and Keefer (1997)’s findings, we find empirical evidences of significant positive direct or indirect effects of active membership in groups on the individual’s disposition toward public good provision, and on the individual positive expectations concerning others’behaviors. This result supports the vision of nonprofits as bearing the values of cooperation and positive tendency toward public issues.

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While recent studies have examined how economic shocks arising from trade competition affect voting results at the aggregate level, we know little about the individual-level mechanisms that bring such effects about. In this contribution, we use long-term individual-level panel data to study the effects of local exposure to import competition on political attitudes. We specifically hypothesize that losing out from trade causes a broad nationalist backlash against globalization, i.e. a decrease in support for international cooperation and a rise in nationalist sentiments. In addition, we explore effects on political disaffection and economic policy preferences. Drawing on the British Household Panel Study (1991-2008), we study intra-individual change in individuals’ political attitudes to allow for a clean identification of causal effects. We focus on the local consequences of the “China shock” and measure the exposure of British NUTS3-regions to the growth in imports from China as a function of their initial sectoral employment structure.

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The relationship between economic hardship & political attitudes is explored for Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, & the Czech Republic. Data from several surveys are analyzed cross-nationally & over time, & interpreted according to two explanatory models, the relative deprivation & entitlement theses. It is found that no strong causal relationship exists between increased household deprivation & increased political participation. Moreover, neither the relative deprivation nor the entitlement thesis accurately explains this evidence.

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This article fills an important gap in the literature on the post-communist transition, by analyzing welfare attitudes. It tests hypotheses about welfare attitudes that were developed for highly industrialized Western democracies, to see how well they fair in the case of a post-communist country, the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic represents a "critical case" for the debates on the transition from communist dictatorships to democratic rule and a market economy. Studies of post-communist politics have generally agreed that among post-communist countries, party competition is not based on socioeconomic issues and voting is not based on class cleav-ages. Instead, certain aspects of the communist legacy and the dynamics of the transformation have prevented such outcomes from arising. However, a large number of studies have also claimed that the Czech Republic represents an exception to this general pattern, which makes it worthwhile to investigate the Czech case more closely.' //"these argu-ments are correct, then the Czech Republic prevents us from generaliz-ing our theories about post-eommunist development. This result would force us in further studies to examine more closely the causes of Czech exccptionaiism.2 On the other hand, if this study shows that party competition is not based on socioeconomic issues, such as welfare, and that class is not important for determining attitudes, that would imply that a large body of literature on the Czech Republic is incorrect. This would also lend support to the theories about the importance of transition and communist legacy. If it turns out that even the country that was supposed to deviate most from the general post-communist pattern actually follows this pattern, then this critical case can give the theories of post-communism greater validity. This article tests theories of post-communism and Czech exception-alism by examining welfare attitudes.

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The differences in economic development across transition countries are sometimes attributed to the extent of interaction between institutions of capitalism and prevailing culture. This study provides a first step towards empirical investigation of this issue. By examining values in CEE countries at the outset of transition (in years 1991, 1993 and 1994) and testing for the presence of the change in years 1998, 2001 and 2002, I assess the hypotheses developed by Schwartz, Bardi and Bianchi (2000). Contrary to their expectations, I find that there is no general inclination towards security, conformity and tradition values at the beginning of transition. On the other hand, with ongoing transition, there is a general tendency towards self-direction, hedonism, universalism, and achievement values as hypothesized.

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It is often assumed that neo-liberal reform has had a significant and negative impact on public support for social citizenship rights. This paper tests such an assumption by reviewing New Zealand public attitudes associated with social rights of citizenship across two decades. While acknowledging the issues that make it difficult to draw comparisons with the past, the paper argues that there is no overwhelming evidence that neo-liberal reform has resulted in a paradigmatic shift away from supporting social citizenship. For instance, New Zealanders now favour tax cuts over redistribution and wage controls, but there is evidence that they are not willing to sacrifice social spending on health, education and, to a lesser degree, targeted social assistance. Given the notoriously problematic nature of public opinion data, however, the paper contends that qualitative research is needed to further unpack these ambiguities and ambivalences in public attitudes towards social citizenship.

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Although Ireland, North and South, is usually considered sui generis in the literature of comparative politics, there has been debate about the socio-economic bases of the parties in the Republic of Ireland. This paper extends this debate by examining the class bases of politics in both parts of Ireland, using strictly comparable data collected in both countries in 1990. The results show that there are major class divisions in both countries and, in comparative terms, high levels of class awareness. In the Republic of Ireland class influences all aspects of politics, including partisanship and political beliefs. In Northern Ireland, class is influential in moulding beliefs, but not partisanship. Overall, the results point to the ability of political elites to control the strategic environment within which they operate, by employing the symbols and rhetoric of events that took place more than 75 years before.

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Rising inequality has caused concerns that democratic governments are no longer responding to majority demands, an argument the authors label the subversion of democracy model (sdm). The sdm comes in two forms: one uses public opinion data to show that policies are strongly biased toward the preferences of the rich; the other uses macrolevel data to show that governments aren’t responding to rising inequality. This article critically reassesses the sdm, points to potential biases, and proposes solutions that suggest a different interpretation of the data, which the authors label the representative democracy model (rdm). After testing the sdm against the rdm on public opinion data and on a new data set on fiscal policy, they find that middle-class power has remained remarkably strong over time, even as inequality has risen. The authors conclude that the rich have little influence on redistributive policies, and that the democratic state is apparently not increasingly constrained by global capital.

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In this paper, we explore the trends and underlying sources of attitudes towards rising income and wealth inequality. Three decades of rising inequality, combined with clear evidence of wage stagnation for the majority of American households, have produced what has been widely described as a “new gilded age” in which the benefits of economic growth and increased productivity have gone primarily to those at the top. We show that in spite of these trends, Americans have not increased their hostility to either inequality or the rich, nor have they increased support for redistributive taxes in recent decades. A classical explanation – but one largely dismissed by contemporary political sociologists – is that an abiding belief in what is known as the “American Dream,” or AD - the belief that American society provides opportunity for advancement irrespective of family background. This possibility has been almost entirely peripheral to recent scholarship on redistributive attitudes in the new Gilded Age, and we test it against other leading models of inequality attitudes. Using a scale of the six most commonly-fielded tax and equality items in the General Social Surveys, we find clear evidence for the relevance of AD beliefs to attitude formation. Greater belief in the AD is associated with significantly lower support for taxes and equality, even taking into account a variety of factors that previous analysts have advanced. Our findings pose a fundamental challenge to existing political sociological models of the subjective foundations of rising inequality.

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Scholars have become increasingly aware of the extent and mechanisms through which various aspects of state capacity affect the functioning of democracy. This research has tended to focus on how failures of the public administration to deliver public goods may breed dissatisfaction, encourage clientelistic electoral strategies, and limit politicians’ ability to formulate and make credible public goods promises in elections. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of investigation by exploring a distinct mechanism through which a specific aspect of state capacity – bureaucratic autonomy or, alternatively, politicization –may affect the functioning of democracy, namely the politicization of policy knowledge. In a two-stage argument, we posit that the politicization of bureaucratic appointments facilitates the politicization of data produced by governments related to outcomes and fiscal considerations of social and economic policies. This politicization of policy knowledge in turn is argued to have implications for citizens’ expectations of democracy, which by extension can have implications for how well the democratic system functions. A case study of Argentina’s statistical agency and multi-level analyses of survey data provide evidence for the two stages.

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Despite recent empirical evidence on the importance of perceived inequality, its analysis is still underexplored. In this paper we study whether unobserved perceptions of inequality are reflected in observed individual opinions in a consistent fashion. Inconsistency is relevant to ealuate the level of agreement that individuals share with respect to different domains of inequality. Using the wave from the 2009 International Social Survey Program in the US, we show that inequality is a complicated concept prone to inconsistencies and propose a testing procedure to an empirical appraisal. We find that inconsistencies exist though they may not extend to all the domains of inequality. This inconsistency also emerges by analyzing the relation between unobserved perceptions and political treatment suggesting the hypothesis that inconsistency may be associated with a set of relevant political preferences.

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The insider-outsider politics has become a growing research topic in comparative political economy and comparative social policy. In this paper we explore the trend and patterns of nonstandard employment in South Korea. The proportion of nonstandard employment is quite high, albeit decreasing slightly. Furthermore, the data shows that labor market outsiders are not adequately protected by social insurance scheme. Nearly invisible unionization rate among nonstandard employees make matters much worse. The results of our analysis of the outsiders’ political behavior suggest that outsiders tended to abstain from voting. They are found to not having distinctively pro-redistribution and pro-social policy preferences, relative to the insiders. Also, the outsiders tend to support both major parties of the center-right and center-left, if they do not choose to be a non-partisan.

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The concept of “precariousness” is finding entry into research on social inequality. It refers to living conditions at risk of poverty coupled with uncertainty and a constrained scope of agency. We ask whether and how opportunity structures provided by welfare regimes reflect in everyday household strategies dealing with precariousness. We contrast population attitudes about and expectations towards the state using ISSP-data with household strategies, derived from qualitative interviews with precarious households in both countries, and find that household strategies vary according to the perceived country’s opportunity structures (“frame”) albeit with various patterns within each country.

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Evidence suggests that our foraging ancestors engaged in the small-scale equivalent of social insurance as an essential tool of survival and evolved a sophisticated psychology of social exchange (involving the social emotions of compassion and anger) to regulate mutual assistance. Here, we hypothesize that political support for modern welfare policies are shaped by these evolved mental programs. In particular, the compassionate motivation to share with needy nonfamily could not have evolved without defenses against opportunists inclined to take without contributing. Cognitively, such parasitic strategies can be identified by the intentional avoidance of productive effort. When detected, this pattern should trigger anger and down-regulate support for assistance. We tested predictions derived from these hypotheses in four studies in two cultures, showing that subjects' perceptions of recipients' effort to find work drive welfare opinions; that such perceptions (and not related perceptions) regulate compassion and anger (and not related emotions); that the effects of perceptions of recipients' effort on opinions about welfare are mediated by anger and compassion, independently of political ideology; and that these emotions not only influence the content of welfare opinions but also how easily they are formed.

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Analyzes the evidence of public opinion polls on the nature of determinants of people's preferences for public expenditures. The majority view is that the status quo should be maintained in most public services. Journal availibility: see EA 511 898. (Author/IRT)

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On the basis of 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data this paper explores the character of government-society relations in post-communist countries, and its dynamics. The use of comparative data and the application of Paige's (1971) political alienation model and Woolcock's and Narayan's (2000) model of government-society relations allows to shed new light on citizen's political attitudes by analysing them in the context of the overall political environment in the country. The results reveal that while citizens in most established democracies bear allegiant attitudes, citizens of post-communist countries feel alienated. Distrust of each other and of the political authorities leads to dysfunctional government-society relations. Since the time of transitional reforms people in post-communist countries have become more confident in their political capability, yet there is no general trend with regards to confidence in political authorities. Those at the margins of society often feel alienated, and dissident attitudes are on the rise, especially among youth.

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The role of religion is rarely acknowledged by economists; although, some studies have already shown its importance for economic development and the body of research is growing. Among other outcomes, previous research has provided some evidence that religiosity matters in the process of formation of economic attitudes, even in post-communist countries. This paper uses the data form International Social Survey Programme to provide additional evidence for those findings.

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In Australia at the end of the 19th Century, bitter industrial conflict pitting trade-union-led labour against large employers led to the establishment of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, a forum for peaceful struggle through centralised wage negotiations.This paper explains the changing attitudes of the people towards trade unions.

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Paper presented at the ESPAnet05 Conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, on 22nd to 24th September 2005

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Several studies have shown that a person's attitude towards immigration affects his or her support for welfare redistribution. According to one view, negative attitudes towards immigration undermine support for welfare redistribution, as those who hold anti-immigration attitudes are thought to view immigrants as undeserving yet disproportionately drawing upon the welfare state. According to a competing view, however, anti-immigration attitudes awaken a person’s own economic insecurities that in turn spur support for welfare protection and redistribution. This article argues and finds substantial evidence in European public opinion that both of these mechanisms can be at play and have implications that depend strongly on a country’s national-level context. In particular, it is found that anti-immigration attitudes yield lower support for redistribution mainly when a respondent’s country faces more immigration, when welfare-state protections are generous, and when migrants actually rely more than natives on the welfare state.

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, Public attitudes toward mental health present an interesting puzzle. While mental health is one aspect of general health and well-being, it receives less support for government spending increases than does health care. One explanation lies with the stigma that is attached to mental illness. This stigma produces more negative attitudes on policy issues related to persons with mental illness such as government spending for mental health. However, group identification, as defined by personal experience or a family member who has experienced a mental illness, may have a strong effect on these attitudes. Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey's module on mental health, I examine this and other hypotheses and find evidence that group identification increases the likelihood of increased support for government spending for mental health. These robust findings exist even in quantitative models, which include politically relevant variables and measure identification with mental illness in two different ways. These findings suggest that mental health is policy for the few because those most supportive of government spending increases are persons who share the common identity of experiencing mental illness.

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Survey evidence reveals substantial cross-national differences in the degree to which individual religious beliefs are associated with individual decisions to participate in religious services. This paper develops and tests arguments about the source of these differences: belief has a larger effect on participation decisions in countries that are economically and politically developed, that have high levels of religious pluralism, and that have low values of social networks in churches. These conditions that create a strong relationship between belief and participation also influence the degree to which participants in religious services are more conservative than others in society on social issues. The analysis therefore suggests specific circumstances under which religious individuals in a country are most able to act as a cohesive “interest group” on social policy issues.

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As the time-scales of natural change accelerate and converge with those of society, Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society takes the reader into largely uncharted territory in its exploration of anthropogenic climate change. Current material is used to highlight the global impact of this issue, and the necessity for multidisciplinary and global social science research and teaching to address the problem. The book is multidisciplinary and worldwide in scope, with contributors spanning specialisms including agro-forestry, economics, environmentalism, ethics, human geography, international relations, law, politics, psychology, sociology and theology. Their global knowledge is reflected in the content of the text, which encompasses chapters on American, European and Chinese policies, case studies of responses to disasters and of the new technological and lifestyle alternatives that are being adopted, and the negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen conference alongside a preface assessing its outcomes. Starting with an initial analysis by a leading climatologist, key issues discussed in the text include recent findings of natural scientists, social causation and vulnerability, media and public recognition or scepticism, and the merits and difficulties of actions seeking to mitigate and adapt. This accessible volume utilizes a wealth of case studies, explains technical terms and minimises the use of acronyms associated with the subject, making it an essential text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students and researchers in the social sciences.

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Opinion polls probing both the narrow and broad senses of social welfare among Americans...

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It is a perennial issue in the public and the scientific debate whether increased pressures to reform due to the financial crisis or population ageing erode welfare state support. Surprisingly, our knowledge of how individuals change their attitudes in hard times is still limited – both theoretically and empirically. We rely on newly available data from a survey experiment in a representative German online survey and exogenously manipulate the perceived pressure to reform (due to an ageing society). We show that people indeed change their reform preferences when faced with an ageing society: the strong opposition to increasing the retirement age decreases. Further analyses reveal that not all groups within society react to increased reform pressures in the same way: political knowledge but also political partisanship do moderate the strength and the direction of the attitude change.

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A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about policy shapes public opinion. Estimating the impact of elites on mass opinion is difficult because of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement error. This article proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing changes in political institutions as instrumental variables. We find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by 50%. We also find no evidence that this effect varies for more politically aware individuals, and our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration.

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It is important to know what wealthy Americans seek from politics and how (if at all) their policy preferences differ from those of other citizens. There can be little doubt that the wealthy exert more political influence than the less affluent do. If they tend to get their way in some areas of public policy, and if they have policy preferences that differ significantly from those of most Americans, the results could be troubling for democratic policy making. Recent evidence indicates that “affluent” Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution are socially more liberal but economically more conservative than others. But until now there has been little systematic evidence about the truly wealthy, such as the top 1 percent. We report the results of a pilot study of the political views and activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders. We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do. If this is so, it raises serious issues for democratic theory.

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During the second half of the19th and early 20th centuries the role of public opinion became a focus of debate for political and social theorists. Although sociologists disagreed whether public opinion was a threat to order they agreed that it exercised an important influence on the working of modern authority. Yet despite his interest in the substantive issues raised in this debate, Max Weber wrote very little about public opinion. His silence on this subject is surprising since public opinion was widely represented as essential for the legitimation of political rule. This essay argues that Weber's reluctance to take part in this conversation may have been influenced by the irresolvable questions raised by the ascendancy of public opinion for his theory of domination.

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Abstract. Scholars and policy makers have traditionally assumed that nations face a tradeoff between income equality and economic efficiency. Greater equality is believed to reduce investment and dampen work incentives. A heterodox view suggests that a more egalitarian distribution of income may have beneficial efficiency effects by augmenting consumer demand and/or encouraging workers to cooperate in upgrading competitiveness. This paper offers an empirical assessment of the relationship between equality and efficiency, based on cross-sectional data from 17 advanced industrialized economies over the period 1974–90. The comparative evidence indicates no adverse impact of greater equality on investment or work effort, nor on growth of productivity or output, trade balances, inflation, or unemployment. On the contrary, higher levels of equality are associated with stronger productivity growth and trade performance, and possibly with higher investment and lower inflation.

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Government-sponsored health insurance is a central pillar of the modern welfare state. In advanced industrial democracies, public spending on medical care accounts for an average of 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), making it the largest category of social spending after public pensions.Computed from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Reform of Health Care Systems: A Review of Seventeen OECD Countries (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1994), 38. The comparison with pensions is made by Karl Hinrichs, “The Impact of German Health Insurance Reforms on Redistribution and the Culture of Solidarity,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1996): 653–87. Despite the popularity and resilience of established health programs, however, the introduction of government-sponsored health coverage has been highly controversial everywhere. Few social programs involve the state so directly in the workings of the economy and the practice of a powerful profession. Few entangle the interests of so many diverse and resourceful groups. And few cast in such stark relief the ideological principles at stake. Although the participants in conflicts over health policy have differed from nation to nation, no country has acquired national health insurance without a fierce and bitter political fight.

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If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts of elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government's political composition, which is then reflected in new policy and (2) policymakers calculate future (mainly electoral) implications of current public views and act accordingly (rational anticipation). We develop multiple indicators of policy activity for the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, then model policy liberalism as a joint function of the two mechanisms. For each institution separately, and also in a global analysis of “government as a whole,” we find that policy responds dynamically to public opinion change. This responsiveness varies by institution, both in level and in mechanism, as would be expected from constitutional design.

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This paper explores the principles that people draw upon to justify their support for social welfare policy in the United States. The data for this study were produced by open-ended questions asked of a representative sample of the U.S. public. The results show that most people readily use values and principles central to the political culture when discussing their policy preferences. The wide diffusion of diverse values--individualism, humanitarianism, and opposition to big government--leads to significant ambivalence in people's discussions of their issue positions. The implications of these patterns of belief for popular support of the welfare state are discussed.

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Insider–outsider theory argues that in dual labour markets there are two groups with opposing preferences regarding protection against dismissal: (i) insiders with permanent work contracts who defend employment protection, because it increases their rents, and (ii) outsiders (temporary workers and the unemployed) who see protection as barriers to mobility and demand deregulation. Although this argument is influential in the political economy literature, there is little empirical research on outsiders’ preferences regarding employment protection. This article tests the argument using French data on support for a proposed reform of employment protection. The results show that permanent and temporary workers do not differ significantly in their support for employment protection, while some evidence indicates that the unemployed do show greater support for deregulation. The article concludes that insider–outsider theory overemphasises the relevance of employment protection for temporary workers and that care should be taken not to place these workers in a composite outsider group with the unemployed.

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This paper uses attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden to test general assumptions about how citizens in West European political systems apply ideological schemas as shortcuts to political preferences. Attitudes towards the third sector are found to be affected by all ideological schemas reflected in the Swedish party system (state-market, Christian traditionalism, and growth-ecology). Contrary to what is implied by findings from America, these effects are very stable across socio-economic groups (especially those of the dominant state-market schema). Similarly, no interaction effects of political sophistication could be traced, and the relative impact of the schemas remains the same regardless of whether or not the third sector is presented as an alternative to the welfare state. The implications of these findings for the nature of public opinion formation in ideologically clear and structured political systems are discussed.

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To what extent do social policy preferences explain party choice? This question has received little attention over the past years, because the bulk of the literature has argued that electoral choice is increasingly shaped by identity-based attitudes, rather than by preferences for economic-distributive social policies. We argue that in the wake of this debate, the significance of social policy preferences for electoral choice has been underestimated, because most contributions neglect social policy debates that are specific to post-industrial societies. In particular, they merely focus on income redistribution, while neglecting distributive conflicts around social investment. The Selects 2011 data allows investigating this crucial distinction for Switzerland. Our empirical analyses confirm that it is pivotal to take the pluridimensionality of distributive conflicts seriously: when looking at preferences for social investment rather than income redistribution, we find that social policy preferences are significant explanatory factors for the choice of the five major Swiss political parties.

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As the asylum crisis hit Europe in tandem with the Great Recession, concerns about declining support for equal welfare provision to immigrants grow. Although studies on welfare deservingness show that immigrants are deemed least entitled to welfare compared to other target groups, they have fallen short of isolating welfare claimants’ identity (i.e. foreign origin) with competing deservingness criteria that might explain the immigrant deservingness gap. This article studies the importance of welfare claimants’ foreign origins relative to other theoretically relevant deservingness criteria via a unique vignette experiment among 23,000 Dutch respondents about their preferred levels of unemployment benefits. We show that foreign origin is among the three most important conditions for reduced solidarity, after labour market reintegration behaviour (reciprocity) and culpability for unemployment (control). Furthermore, favourable criteria do not close the gap between immigrants and natives in perceived deservingness, emphasizing the difficulty of overcoming the immigrant penalty in perceived welfare deservingness. We conclude our findings in the light of ongoing theoretical and political debates.

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While economic downturns have adverse effects on young people's life chances, empirical studies examining whether and to what extent human values, social attitudes and well-being indicators respond to sudden economic shocks are scarce. To assess the claim that human values are less affected by economic shocks than social attitudes and well-being, two distinct yet related studies based on the European Social Survey (ESS) are conducted. The first employs a fixed effects pseudo-panel analysis of the 2008–2014 ESS-waves to detect whether changes over time in the socio-demographic group's unemployment risk and national youth unemployment affect individual dispositions to varying degrees. The second study captures micro- and cross-national effects in the 2010 ESS cross-section. Unique for this set-up is that we can test whether the findings hold for over-time changes in youth unemployment within countries (pseudo-panel), as well as for cross-country differences in youth unemployment (multilevel). Both studies indicate that political trust, satisfaction with the economy and subjective well-being are lowered by economic risk and hardship, while social trust and self-rated health are less affected by changes in youth unemployment. Secondly, human values are immune to economic risk, underscoring that values transcend specific situations and are therefore resistant against sudden economic shocks.

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Democracies, and the citizenries that stand at their center, are not natural phenomena; they are made and sustained through politics. Government policies can play a crucial role in this process, shaping the things publics believe and want, the ways citizens view themselves and others, and how they understand and act toward the political system. Yet, while political scientists have said a great deal about how publics influence policies, they know far less about the ways policies influence publics. In this article, we seek to clarify how policies, once enacted, are likely to affect political thought and action in the citizenry. Such effects are hard to locate within the standard framework of approaches to mass behavior, and they are generally ignored by program evaluators and policy analysts. To bridge this gap, we direct attention toward a long and vibrant, but underappreciated, line of inquiry we call the “political tradition” of mass behavior research. Drawing this tradition together with recent work on “policy feedback,” we outline a framework for thinking about how policies influence mass politics. The major types of such effects include defining membership; forging political cohesion and group divisions; building or undermining civic capacities; framing policy agendas, problems, and evaluations; and structuring, stimulating, and stalling political participation.

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Les sociétés industrielles avancées sont confrontées à des pressions de plus en plus fortes qui les poussent à réformer leur système de protection sociale, alors même que les programmes sociaux bénéficient en général d'un soutien politique conséquent. Prises entre la capacité de résistance des institutions sociales et un contexte qui exige la rigueur permanente, les politiques de réforme ont dans l'ensemble centré leurs efforts sur la construction de vastes coalitions visant à restructurer, plutôt qu'à démanteler, les États-providence arrivés à maturité. Comprendre les dynamiques de réforme exige d'une part, de distinguer précisément les dimensions selon lesquelles opère cette dernière [que j'intitule " cost-containment " (contingentement des dépenses), " recommodification " (remarchandisation) et " recalibration " (reconfiguration)] et d'autre part de prendre en compte les arrangements institutionnels et politiques spécifiques à l'œuvre dans chacun des régimes de protection sociale, libéral, conservateur, corporatiste et social-démocrate. /// The advanced industrial democracies face mounting pressures to reform their welfare states at the same time that social programs generally continue to elicit substantial political support. Caught between the resilience of social programs and a context of permanent austerity, the politics of reform have generally centered on efforts to construct broad coalitions in support of restructuring rather than dismantling of mature welfare states. Understanding the dynamics of reform requires an appreciation for the distinct dimensions of reform (which I term cost containment, recommodification, and recalibration) and the distinctive political and policy configurations that operate in liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare regimes. /// Die fortschrittlichen Industriegesellschaften sind immer größerem Druck zur Reform ihrer Sozialversicherungssysteme ausgesetzt, obwohl die Sozialprogramme allgemein eine große politische Unterstützung finden. Reformpolitiken müssen einerseits die Widerstandsfähigkeit der Sozialeinrichtungen, andererseits die permanente Ausgabendisziplin des Umfeldes berücksichtigen und richten daher allgemein ihre Bemühungen auf die Erstellung von weitgreifenden Koalitionen aus, mit dem Zweck, den ausgereiften Wohlfahrtsstaat zwar nicht auseinanderzunehmen, sondern ihn eher umzustrukturieren. Zum Verständnis der Reformdynamik müssen zunächst die Dimensionen genau unterschieden werden, die der Reform zugrundeliegen und darüber hinaus die spezifischen institutionellen und politischen Vereinbarungen berücksichtigt werden, die in jedem der Sozialschutzregime vorhanden sind, ob sie liberal, konservativ, korporativ oder sozial-demokratisch sind /// Las adelantadas sociedades industriales se enfrentan a presiones cada vez mas difíciles que las empujan a reformar su sistema de protección social, mientras que los programas sociales incluso benefician en general de un consecuente apoyo político. Atrapadas entre la capacidad de resistencia de las instituciones sociales y un contexto que exige un rigor permanente, las políticas de reforma en su conjunto construyen sus esfuerzos en amplias coaliciones que tratan de reestructurar mas bien que de desmantelar, a los Estados-providencia que llegaron a su madurez. Comprender las dinámicas de la reforma exige por una parte, distinguir precisamente las dimensiones según las cuales opera esta última y, por otra parte, considerar los arreglos institucionales y políticos específicos y útiles en cada uno de los regímenes de protección social, liberal, conservador, corporativa y social-demócrata.

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The way that welfare policies influence the interpretative processes of social actors is attracting increasing attention. In this article, we investigate policy change impacts on ideas mothers have about the best form of care for their children. The data are taken from representative surveys among mothers of preschool-age children in 2002 and 2010 in Norway. The surveys cover a decade of marked reforms in childcare services with regard to the supply of places, parents’ fees and the right to be given a place in care. Policy change gave rise to major shifts in attitude. From conditional attitudes to the suitability of institutional care, the majority view shifted towards ‘childcare services only’ being considered the best form of care for preschool-age children. This occurred among mothers in all socio-economic groups and in all parts of the country. Based on policy feedback theories, mechanisms likely to have caused this shift – policy visibility, proximity and timing – are considered.

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Summary This contribution empirically explores the drivers of labour market reform acceptance for the individual level in Germany. For that purpose we make use of the representative German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). This survey offers data to which extent individuals support benefit cuts, longer working years, cutting subsidies to declining industries, phasing out of employment programmes, or a liberalisation of employment protection. Our theoretical considerations suggest that self-interest, information, fairness judgements, economic beliefs and other individual factors such as socialisation under the communist regime in the former German Democratic Republic drive individual reform preferences. Our empirical results support this notion: While we find self-interest to be an important driving force, our results show that a number of factors well beyond the narrow scope of self-interest strongly shape individual reform preferences.

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Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial economic shocks. Citizens' policy attitudes in turn appear highly responsive to economic worries, as well as to the experience of economic shocks—with worries and shocks creating greater support for government policies that buffer the relevant economic risk. Attitudes seem most affected by temporally proximate shocks, shocks befalling households that have weak private safety nets, and shocks occurring within the domain most relevant to the policy in question, though attitudes are also (more weakly) correlated with shocks in other domains. The magnitude of these associations rivals partisanship and ideology and almost always exceeds that for conventional measures of socio-economic status. Given the long-term increase in economic insecurity and current sluggish recovery, understanding how insecurity shapes citizens' policy attitudes and political behavior should be a major concern of political science.

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In order to explain why people differ in their attitudes towards public childcare, we present a theoretical framework that integrates four causal mechanisms: regime socialisation, political ideology, family involvement and material self-interest. Estimation results obtained from multivariate regressions on the 2002 German General Social Survey and replications on the 2008/9 European Social Survey can be condensed into three statements: (1) Regime socialisation is the single most important determinant of attitudes toward public childcare, followed by young age as an indicator of self-interest and political ideology. Family involvement does not have any sizeable impact. (2) Regime socialisation conditions the impact of some indicators of political ideology and family involvement on attitudes toward public childcare. (3) Despite a paradigmatic shift in policy, the dynamics of 2008 mirror those of 2002, highlighting the stability of inter-individual differences in support. The results suggest that the ‘shadow of communism’ still stretches over what people in the East expect from the welfare state and that individual difference in the demand for public childcare appears to be highly path-dependent.

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In this article we analyze preferences for tax schemes, using data on subjective evaluations of the taxes paid by different income groups. We estimate multilevel models to test the effect of socio-economic status and political ideology on individual preferences. We find that both self-interest motivations and political ideology are important factors in explaining preferences for tax schemes. At the national level, it is found that the fiscal burden shapes preferences for tax schemes (especially direct taxation) and it has an interacting effect with both self-interest and ideological variables. At higher levels of direct taxation, probabilities of supporting redistribution toward the poor and the rich become highly polarized along political affiliations. This suggests a mobilization effect. As direct taxation increases, left-wing parties strengthen their ability to mobilize their electorates to pursue further their redistributive interests, while right-wing voters increase their resistance to taxing the rich.

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Abstract. How does labour market disadvantage translate into political behaviour? Bringing together the literatures on political alienation, redistribution pre

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This study examines the extent to which individual's attitudes toward government responsibility for child care provisions are influenced by personal characteristics as well as the social contexts in which these attitudes are formed. The analysis draws on data from a random sample of 24, 240 respondents in 12 of the countries included in the European Social Survey (ESS) round 4 (2008–2009). The analytic framework focuses on individual-level factors related to self-interest, perceptions of the current care available and egalitarian ideology as well as the societal context reflected in the alternative institutional arrangements for social welfare represented by the countries clustered into different welfare state regimes. The findings indicate that among the individual level variables, although factors related to self interest were significant, egalitarian ideology had the relatively strongest impact on the respondents' level of support for government provision of child care. At the institutional level the introduction of welfare regimes increased the proportion of explained variance well beyond that accounted for by individual level factors.

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Much politico-economic research on individuals’ preferences is cross-sectional and does not model dynamic aspects of preference or attitude formation. I present a Bayesian dynamic panel model, which facilitates the analysis of repeated preferences using individual-level panel data. My model deals with three problems. First, I explicitly include feedback from previous preferences taking into account that available survey measures of preferences are categorical. Second, I model individuals' initial conditions when entering the panel as resulting from observed and unobserved individual attributes. Third, I capture unobserved individual preference heterogeneity both via standard parametric random effects and a robust alternative based on Bayesian nonparametric density estimation. I use this model to analyze the impact of income and wealth on preferences for government intervention using the British Household Panel Study from 1991 to 2007.

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Citizens’ social policy opinions are strongly influenced by a simple heuristic: Are the recipients of social benefits deserving or not? Adding to this growing literature, we provide evidence that the deservingness heuristic does not treat all social benefits alike. Already at the level of preconscious processing, the heuristic displays a bias toward tagging the recipients of health care—that is, sick individuals—as deserving. This powerful, implicit effect overrides other opinion factors and produces broad-based support among the public for health care—across levels of self-interest, media frames, ideological divides, and national cultures. In contrast, when the deservingness heuristic is utilized for reasoning about unemployment benefits, implicit psychological constraints are fewer and political conflict erupts depending on differences in interest and worldviews. Using a variety of methodologies, we track this fundamental difference between the politics of health care and unemployment benefits from the level of implicit processing to the level of political attitudes.

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Despite the large volume of literature on childcare provision across countries, individuals’ attitudes and preferences concerning the role of government in the provision of childcare remain largely unexplored. This study examines how current policy provision structures influence the degree to which parents in European countries support public provision of childcare. Current provision is measured here through objective and subjective indicators, both at the individual and national levels. The relative importance of current provision structures on support for public childcare is then compared with other welfare attitude determinants; i.e., self-interest and political attitudes. This is done using data from 22 European countries in 2008/9 and a multilevel modelling technique. Results show that in general parents across Europe are largely supportive of public childcare provision. Furthermore, current provision structures, and people’s assessment of it, are consistently related to parents’ support for public childcare. Current provisions are salient factor explaining variance in childcare support (both at the individual and national level) over and beyond the most commonly used frameworks, namely self-interest and ideologies. The results of this study provide evidence for a vicious and virtuous cycle in the relationship between policy provision and support, where investment in policies may drive up support while rolling back of policies may further decrease support.

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The political economy literature has gathered compelling evidence that labour market risks shape political preferences. Accordingly, insecurity fuels support for redistribution and left parties. This article analyses this argument for temporary workers, a so far neglected risk category which has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Temporary workers also have been in the focus of recent insider-outsider debates. Some authors in this line of research have argued that temporary work leads to political disenchantment – for example, non-instrumental responses such as vote abstention or protest voting. This contradicts risk-based explanations of political preferences. The article discusses both theoretical perspectives and derives conflicting hypotheses for the empirical analysis of temporary workers' policy and party preferences. The review reveals considerable ambiguity regarding the questions which parties temporary workers can be expected to support and what the underlying motives for party choice are. Synthesising arguments from both perspectives, the article proposes an alternative argument according to which temporary workers are expected to support the ‘new’ left – that is, green and other left-libertarian parties. It is argued that this party family combines redistributive policies with outsider-friendly policy design. Using individual-level data from the European Social Survey for 15 European countries, the article supports this argument by showing that temporary, compared to permanent, workers exhibit higher demand for redistribution and stronger support for the new left. Neither the risk-based nor the insider-outsider explanations receive full support. In particular, no signs of political disenchantment of temporary workers can be found. Thus, the findings challenge central claims of the insider-outsider literature.

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In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

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Abstract. Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare poli

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The aim of this article is to examine the effect of social relations on support for redistribution and to explore desirable forms of redistribution based on mutual understanding. Most previous studies have explained support for redistribution as insurance against risk or the pursuit of self-interest. Under the current framework, however, it is difficult to explain the establishment of a sustainable redistributive policy. To overcome this limitation, I focus on the role of social relations that suppress the tendency to pursue self-interest and promote support for redistribution. My findings indicate that social relations moderate the effect of self-interest and directly affect support for redistribution. From this result, I conclude that social relations could facilitate mutual understanding and alleviate the negative side effects of the labor market.

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Abstract. The concept of the social investment welfare state has received a lot of attention and support both from academics and policymakers. It is therefore

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This study analyses preferences regarding leave length, gender division of leave, and leave financing in four countries with different welfare-state and leave regimes. Embedded in a gender perspective, institutional, self-interest, and ideational theoretical approaches are used to explore the factors shaping individuals' preferences (ISSP 2012 data). Findings show dramatic cross-country differences, suggesting the institutional dimension is most strongly related to leave policy preferences. Self-interest and values concerning gender relations and state responsibility are also important correlates. The study identifies mismatches between leave preferences, entitlements, and uptake, with implications for policy reform and the gendered division of parenting.

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Abstract. Does the parliamentary behavior of members of parliament, parliamentary parties, and government correspond with the public's preferences regarding po

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This essay seeks to lay the foundation for an understanding of welfare state retrenchment. Previous discussions have generally relied, at least implicitly, on a reflexive application of theories designed to explain welfare state expansion. Such an approach is seriously flawed. Not only is the goal of retrenchment (avoiding blame for cutting existing programs) far different from the goal of expansion (claiming credit for new social benefits), but the welfare state itself vastly alters the terrain on which the politics of social policy is fought out. Only an appreciation of how mature social programs create a new politics can allow us to make sense of the welfare state's remarkable resilience over the past two decades of austerity. Theoretical argument is combined with quantitative and qualitative data from four cases (Britain, the United States, Germany, and Sweden) to demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional wisdom and to highlight the factors that limit or facilitate retrenchment success.

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Public opinion research has found that increasing the investment in education is generally very popular among citizens in Western Europe. However, this evidence from publicly available opinion surveys may be misleading, because these surveys do not force respondents to prioritize between different parts of the education system or between education and other social policies, nor do they provide information about citizens’ willingness to pay for additional investment in education. To address these deficiencies, we conducted an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related policies in eight European countries. Our analysis confirms that citizens express high levels of support for education even when they are forced to choose between education and other areas of social spending. But not all educational sectors enjoy equally high levels of support: increasing spending on general schooling and vocational education is more popular than increasing spending on higher education and early childhood education. Furthermore, we find that citizens are, in fact, willing to pay additional taxes in order to finance investment in education, at least in some countries and for some sectors of the education system.

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Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservatism, relative economic conservatism, social conservatism, and immigration conservatism of men and women in three age categories in each country. Aggregating the group-level estimates yields estimates of the average conservatism in national publics in each biennium between 1981–82 and 2015–16. The four measures exhibit contrasting cross-sectional cleavages and distinct temporal dynamics, illustrating the multidimensionality of mass ideology in Europe. Subjecting our measures to a series of validation tests, we show that the constructs they measure are distinct and substantively important and that they perform as well as or better than one-dimensional proxies for mass conservatism (left–right self-placement and median voter scores). We foresee many uses for these scores by scholars of public opinion, electoral behavior, representation, and policy feedback.

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We show theoretically that income redistribution benefits borrowing-constrained individuals more than is implied by standard relative-income and uninsurable-risk considerations. Empirically, we find in international opinion-survey data that younger and lower-income individuals express stronger support for government redistribution in countries where consumer credit is less easily available. This evidence supports our theoretical perspective if such individuals are more strongly affected by tighter credit supply, in that expectations of higher incomes in the future increase their propensity to borrow.

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Using probabilistic expectations data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we establish a link between self-reported expectations of occupational mobility and preferences for redistribution. Our results provide new evidence on the validity of the “prospect of upward mobility” hypothesis.

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Recent research suggests that intergenerational income mobility has remained low and stable in America, but popular discourse routinely assumes that Americans are optimistic about mobility prospects in society. Examining these 2 seemingly contradictory observations requires a careful measurement of the public’s perceptions of mobility. Unlike most previous work that measures perceptions about mobility outcomes for the overall population or certain subgroups, we propose a survey instrument that emphasizes the variation in perceived mobility prospects for hypothetical children across parent income ranks. Based on this survey instrument, we derive the perceived relationship between the income ranks of parents and children, which can then be compared against the actual rank–rank relationship reported by empirical work based on tax data. We fielded this instrument in a general population survey experiment (n = 3,077). Our results suggest that Americans overestimate the intergenerational persistence in income ranks. They overestimate economic prospects for children from rich families and underestimate economic prospects for those from poor families.

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Proposes a causal model whereby attitude toward welfare state programs is a function of self-interest or life experiences and of the resulting identification with either the work ethic or the social equality ideology. Uses data from the 1983 Detroit Area Study to confirm the model. Contains 66 references. (SV)

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Previous cross-national research suggests that women may be less likely to prefer family-based support to older adults and more likely to prefer government-based support compared to men. Guided by theories of gendered paid and unpaid labor, social network resources and strain, and global inequality, this paper investigates whether a gender gap in attitudes exists and, if so, whether it can be explained by characteristics of family, work, social networks and roles, and national context. Analyzing data from two cross-sectional International Social Survey Programme samples (2001, N = 23,360; 2012, N = 16,558) and aggregate nation-level data sources across 20 nations, the authors use multilevel modeling to predict four measures of attitudes toward family-based and/or government-based support. We find evidence of a small gender gap in attitudes. Overall, women are less likely to agree that children have a duty, more likely to say the government should definitely be responsible, and more likely to prefer that the government pay for care instead of the family/individual compared to men. Family resources, social support, occupational insecurity, and role strain are each associated with attitudes in the theorized directions, but only partially explain the gender gap in attitudes. Finally, attitudes toward older adult support vary predictably by national cultural, political, and economic measures, but the gender gap in attitudes varies cross-nationally and is likely limited to specific contexts. We discuss these findings in light of measurement options, gendered patterns of care cross-nationally, and global disparities in formal resources for caregiving.

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The societal effects of the welfare state are a perennial issue in the public debate. Critics accuse the welfare state of having unintended economic and moral consequences rather than producing its intended social goals. Popular perceptions of possible consequences of the welfare state are a crucial component of welfare state legitimacy, but have received hardly any scholarly attention. Using the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, we analyse how European citizens perceive the consequences of the welfare state, whether perceived positive consequences outweigh the negative consequences, and to what extent consequence perceptions are determined by individual and country-level factors. The conclusion is that the European public has a clearer eye for the positive social than for negative economic and moral consequences. Moreover, at the individual level these perceptions are mainly influenced by ideational factors, while they are affected by welfare state generosity at the country level. Interestingly, in more developed welfare states the public perceives the negative, as well as the positive consequences more strongly.

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In the advanced economies, a substantial fraction of total income is regularly transferred from the better off to the less well off, with the approval of the electorate. Economists have for the most part misunderstood this phenomenon due to their endorsement of an empirically implausible theory of selfish human motivation. Understanding why citizens regularly vote for parties endorsing redistributive policies requires a reconsideration of the behavioral assumptions of economics. We find that voters support the welfare state because it conforms to deeply held norms of reciprocity and conditional obligations to others.

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We revisit a longstanding hypothesis that the public become more supportive of redistributive policy as income inequality rises. Previous tests of this hypothesis using various forms of general least squares regressions are inconclusive. We suggest improvements and alternatives to these tests. Using the World Inequality Data and International Social Survey Program we analyze 91 surveys in 18 countries. We incorporate three alternative measures of income inequality, including a measure of liberalization as a known cause of increases in income inequality. We also employ two alternative test formats that arguably reflect the data generating model better than a least squares regression. The first is vector-autoregression aiming to account for path dependency of public opinion and income inequality, and the endogeneity between them. Next is qualitative comparative analysis to capture sets of conditions that collectively should have led to inequality having an impact on public opinion. Finally, we run our regression models separately for low and high socio-economic strata. In all tests we find no measurable impact of income inequality on support for redistribution. From a macro-perspective we argue that this suggests ruling out a general effect that exists across space and time, and focusing instead on theory to explain why there should not be a general effect. Some arguments suggest the public are normatively opposed to what sounds like ‘handouts'. We therefore discuss model specification via theory, but also Type II errors, statistical power and the limitations of our conclusions.

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Abstract We present the results from a natural survey-experiment that tests the effect of a sudden increase in health risks – a flu epidemic – on the public's support for government involvement in health care provision. The data covers 17 European countries and around 10,000 respondents. It was collected in 2008 as part of the European Social Survey. We find that the flu epidemic led to a significant decline in support. Interestingly, changes where located predominantly among those respondents that are self-described right-leaning in ideological terms. The effects of the flu epidemic lasted several weeks and in some instances persisted as long as it was possible to track with the data (i.e., a month). Given that this was a single-event stimulus such a comparably long-lasting effect is noteworthy for both public policy-makers and political scientists.

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Abstract What drives people's support of governmental reduction of income inequality? We employ data from a large international survey in order to evaluate the explanatory power of three competing forces, referred to as the ‘homo oeconomicus effect', the ‘public values effect', and the ‘social rivalry effect'. The empirical analysis reveals that at the aggregate level all three effects play a significant role in shaping individual preferences for political redistribution. Attitudes of citizens in formerly socialist countries turn out to differ from those of western citizens in a systematic way.

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Can government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policymaking? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different ways. I hypothesize that one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more responsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.

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Using data from the General Social Survey the current study examines period and cohort differences in attitudes toward welfare state spending for old age programs. Using the Torres-Gil classification system, the study uses cross-sectional data from the 1984-2004 waves of data to identify any differences by period and cohort group membership in whether or not it is the government's responsibility to provide a decent standard of living for older adults, whether or not respondents felt that the current level of spending for Social Security was adequate, and whether or not respondents were willing to make sacrifices such as paying higher taxes to pay for greater retirement benefits. The findings suggest that the generational conflict that many suggested might arise has not come to fruition. Indeed, the youngest cohorts in these analysis were the most likely to support higher taxes to pay for better retirement benefits. Perhaps more interesting were the findings that there were no significant period effects for whether or not the government was responsible for providing a decent standard of living but there were such effects when examining whether or not Social Security funding levels were adequate.

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Abstract. This paper addresses the issue of why comparative research on welfare state attitudes has failed to establish a link between welfare regimes and popu

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Abstract This research examines public views on government responsibility to reduce income inequality, support for redistribution. While individual-level correlates of support for redistribution are relatively well understood, many questions remain at the country-level. Therefore, I examine how country-level characteristics affect aggregate support for redistribution. I test explanations of aggregate support using a unique dataset combining 18 waves of the International Social Survey Programme and European Social Survey. Results from mixed-effects logistic regression and fixed-effects linear regression models show two primary and contrasting effects. States that reduce inequality through bundles of tax and transfer policies are rewarded with more supportive publics. In contrast, economic development has a seemingly equivalent and dampening effect on public support. Importantly, the effect of economic development grows at higher levels of development, potentially overwhelming the amplifying effect of state redistribution. My results therefore suggest a fundamental challenge to proponents of egalitarian politics.

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In the political economy of education policy, interactions between policymakers and public opinion can create discrepancies between political awareness and action. While a large literature studies public opinion on different aspects of the welfare state, research has only recently started to investigate the public's attitudes towards education policy. We survey this emerging literature with a particular focus on public preferences for education spending in different sociodemographic subgroups, policy trade-offs, support for specific education reforms, and the importance of information for public preferences. While the available evidence is multifaceted, there is some general indication that citizens place high priority on education policy, show substantial willingness to reform, and are responsive to information and adequate reform designs.

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This paper tests contested arguments within the institutionalist literature about the relation between institutional and attitudinal changes, using the reunified Germany as a case. Eastern Germany constitutes a case approaching a ‘natural experiment' for the social sciences, being twice the receiver of externally imposed institutions. It, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to closely analyse institutional effects on attitudes, as in this particular case, the time order of institutional and attitudinal changes can actually be decided. Using data from the International Social Survey Program modules on ‘The Role of Government' (1990, 1996, and 2006), attitudes towards government responsibilities are compared in Eastern and Western Germany, and to other countries. Results show a considerable convergence in attitudes between Eastern and Western Germany – attitudes in Western Germany are completely stable while attitudes in Eastern Germany become, overtime, more similar to those found in the West. Furthermore, comparisons of different birth cohorts show that while considerable attitude differences between Eastern and Western Germany are still found in 2006 among those who had their forming experiences before the fall of the wall, differences are virtually nil among those who were still children in 1989. In summary, the analysis provides strong support for the attitude-forming effects of institutions, and a clear vindication of institutional theories. It also points to generational replacement as a key mechanism in translating institutional change into attitudinal change.

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The mass franchise led to more responsive government and a more equitable distribution of resources in the United States and other democracies. Recently in America, however, voter participation has been low and increasingly biased toward the wealthy. We investigate whether this electoral “class bias” shapes government ideology, the substance of economic policy, and distributional outcomes, thereby shedding light on both the old question of whether who votes matters and the newer question of how politics has contributed to growing income inequality. Because both lower and upper income groups try to use their resources to mobilize their supporters and demobilize their opponents, we argue that variation in class bias in turnout is a good indicator of the balance of power between upper and lower income groups. And because lower income voters favor more liberal governments and economic policies we expect that less class bias will be associated with these outcomes and a more equal income distribution. Our analysis of data from the U.S. states confirms that class bias matters for these outcomes.

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Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy preferences in the 1980s and 1990s from the General Social Survey, we find little support for these views. Instead, Americans do tend to object to inequality and increasingly believe government should act to redress it, but not via traditional redistributive programs. We examine several alternative possibilities and provide a broad analytical framework for reinterpreting social policy preferences in the era of rising inequality. Our evidence suggests that Americans may be unsure or uninformed about how to address rising inequality and thus swayed by contemporaneous debates. However, we also find that Americans favor expanding education spending in response to their increasing concerns about inequality. This suggests that equal opportunity may be more germane than income redistribution to our understanding of the politics of inequality.

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Existing studies imply a model of “thermostatic voting”—a phenomenon characterized by negative feedback from government policy to election outcomes, suggesting that a party's success in setting policy diminishes its electoral prospects. This phenomenon could give politicians an incentive to constrain the fulfillment of public demands, which would conflict with the notion of electoral accountability, which also forms part of the theoretical framework in question. This article addresses this paradox and provides new data that expand an existing time series of American policy liberalism. Employing the new data, the article identifies thermostatic voting in American presidential elections, but in light of the analysis, certain empirical features are also identified that reduce the possible incentive to withhold promised policy changes.

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We test whether politicians' communications shape their supporters' policy priorities by conducting a field experiment in collaboration with several local elected officials. In the experiment, the officials sent out email messages to the constituents on their distribution lists. Half the constituents received messages where the official advocated for the priority of a given issue, while the other half received a placebo email. We surveyed the constituents one to two months before the message went out and again the week after the official sent the message. The experiment shows that politicians did not change citizens' priorities in the desired direction. Moreover, citizens who received a message where the official indicated the issue was a priority were not more likely to act when invited to sign a petition on the issue. Elected officials' ability to shape the priorities of the politically active citizens with whom they regularly communicate is limited and can even be self-defeating.

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The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy area has a positive conditioning effect on the link between public priorities and attention for the president's State of the Union Address. However, our results do not find a positive effect for voluntary associations at later stages of the policy cycle, which experience a higher degree of institutional friction. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different stages of policymaking when considering the impact of voluntary associations on dynamic agenda responsiveness.

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Using structural equation techniques and the LISREL software package, we successfully replicate the results of Hasenfeld and Rafferty's causal model predicting public attitudes toward welfare state programs. By taking advantage of the ability of these techniques to incorporate estimates of measurement error, we also assess the consequences of imperfect measurement in several of their key variables. Our analyses yield results that fail to support the authors' original conclusions. In addition, we believe they bring to light several problems concerning the operationalization of crucial concepts in Hasenfeld and Rafferty's (1989) model. We conclude that a more rigorous test of the authors' model would account for measurement error while using measures that correspond to their theoretical definitions.

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Over the past four decades the wealthiest OECD economies-in Europe, North America, and Australasia- have faced massive structural change. Industrial sectors, which were once considered the economic backbone of these societies, have shrunk inexorably in terms of size and economic significance, while service sectors have taken over as the primary engines of output and employment expansion. The impact on labor markets has been profound: in many OECD countries more than three-quarters of employment is now in services, while industrial sectors, on average, account for less than one-fifth. This sectoral shift in the locus of economic activity has potentially radical implications for politics and society. However, these implications are only beginning to be understood. This path-breaking book is a systematic attempt to understand the distinct political economy of service societies. It examines how different types of socio-economic regimes manage the service transition, with a central focus on job creation and destruction and the changing characteristics of labor markets, and shows that the economic, distributional, and political outcomes with which it is associated vary across countries depending on their political-institutional structures.

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Did Americans respond to the recent Great Recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity, an expectation of state-of-the-art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion? Or did the recession erode support for government activism, in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect? We find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010, yet both fixed-effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy-attitude formation. What accounts for these surprising developments? We consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes. Analyzing the General Social Surveys panel, our results suggest political partisanship has been central. Gallup and Evaluations of Government and Society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government overreach, in which federal programs adopted during the recession and the Obama presidency propelled voters away from government. We note implications for theoretical models of opinion formation, as well as directions for partisanship scholarship and interdisciplinary research on the Great Recession.

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Muuri A. The impact of the use of the social welfare services or social security benefits on attitudes to social welfare policies Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 182–193 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article investigates the attitudes of citizens and clients to social welfare services and social security benefits. The data come from a Finnish national survey conducted at the end of 2006. First, the article overviews the previous welfare-state studies relating especially to the theoretical perspectives of self-interest and legitimacy. The empirical analysis indicates (i) that a different operation of self-interest can only weakly explain the differences in attitudes between services and benefits; (ii) that there is general support for Finnish social welfare services and social security benefits, which, however, is mixed with growing criticism among women and pensioners who are supposed to benefit most from the welfare policies; and (iii) that such determinants of attitude as gender, use and, to some extent, lifecycle have become as important as class-related factors such as income and education.

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The present study examines the association between individualistic values and citizens´ attitudes towards the state’s welfare responsibility (welfare attitudes). This study also examines the association between political placement and welfare attitudes. Data from the European Social Survey (N = 37,743 in 20 countries) are analyzed using a two-level regression analysis. The findings indicate that individualism at the cultural culture is a significant factor in terms of individuals’ attitudes to welfare, in that the higher the level of individualism, the lesser the likelihood that the state’s welfare responsibility is supported. On the other hand, citizens’ attitudes towards state responsibility for welfare are associated with the political placement of those citizens. Politically, people leaning to the right have a lower degree of interest in the state’s welfare responsibility. Furthermore, the degree of individualism modifies the association at the individual level of political placement and welfare attitudes. There is a greater attitudinal difference between the supporters of right-wing and left-wing political views in individualistic countries than in collectivist countries. From a social policy perspective, this study emphasizes the association of individualism and welfare attitudes. The results suggest that social policy is based more on national cultural values than one might assume.

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Abstract. The analysis of the association between welfare state institutions and individual-level attitudes has become an important research topic in the past

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Recent work on the issue of welfare entitlements in Central and Eastern Europe has focused on discovering the variation in citizens' preferences both within and between the post-communist states and across individual social policy areas. Empirical results suggest that substantial attitudinal differences exist along both of these dimensions. In this paper we build on extant work in two ways: first, rather than focusing on aggregated attitudes towards entitlements, we examine the micro-level influences on both government responsibility for and government spending on welfare assistance, and second, we expand the spatial scope of other studies to include countries from Western Europe. This allows us to generate conclusions about how the different political contexts (stable democracies versus recent transitions) affect individual welfare beliefs.

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Abstract. This article investigates an established proposition in the welfare literature, namely whether retrenchment is indeed unpopular among the citizenry.

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During the last two decades of the 20th century, the predominant opinion among elites in most Western nations has been that market economies, competition, free trade, and minimal government regulation are more efficient than government ownership of the economy. Throughout the West government policy has steadily shifted toward freeing market forces within nations and the globalization of trade between nations; changes in Eastern Europe have been even more dramatic. But it is by no means clear that the Western public accepts the elite's views. It is even less clear what the general public in Eastern Europe – raised under Communism and exposed to widespread disruption and economic decline in the years following its collapse – thinks. I address these issues with extensive survey data from large, representative national samples in Australia, Finland, Poland, and Bulgaria. I find that by the mid-1990s the general public in both East and West were convinced that private enterprise is much more efficient than government-owned firms, although the East remained more sympathetic to government ownership. In all four nations, the educational elite were more persuaded of the virtues of the market than were their less-educated peers. In all four nations, support for government ownership depended on positive evaluations of the economic efficiency of government enterprises to roughly the same degree. It also depended on the desirability of consumer subsidies and the desirability of job protection. Here, the public in both East and West departed from the prevailing dogma of economic liberalism.

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Although post-communist Europe retains elements of its socialist past, public opinion shows discernment in its welfare preferences. This analysis of post-communist social welfare attitudes finds that post-communist societies are selective in their support for social policies. First, welfare preferences center on two underlying realms: government responsibility and government spending; and second, welfare opinions and beliefs are not uniform across several social policies. Although many of the conclusions highlight the selective nature of these preferences, the example of the support for unemployment benefits points to how the transition from communist-era welfare states to capitalist-led assistance continues to influence public opinion in these countries.

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Moderne Industriegesellschaften benötigen in besonderem Maße die breite Unterstützung durch die Bevölkerung zur Sicherung der gesellschaftlichen Stabilität. Gerade wenn die Bürger in ihren politischen Rechten gleich sind, ist für die Akzeptanz eines politischen Systems (vgl. Kielmansegg 1977) entscheidend, inwieweit andere Formen sozialer Ungleichheit von der Bevölkerung hingenommen werden.

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Die Vereinigung beider Teile Deutschlands hat sowohl für den Osten als auch für den Westen zu erheblichen Umbrüchen in den bestehenden Systemen sozialer Ungleichheit geführt. In Ostdeutschland ist ein komplettes Gesellschaftssystem zusammengebrochen, das unter dem ökonomischen Aspekt gekennzeichnet war durch relativ geringe Unterschiede zwischen den Menschen hinsichtlich Einkommen und Vermögen, durch das Fehlen von Arbeitslosigkeit, durch eine allgemeine Daseinsvorsorge durch den Staat — wenn auch auf niedrigem Niveau — und relativ geringe Handlungsspielräume für den wirtschaftenden Menschen, bedingt unter anderem durch die weitgehende Abschaffung des Privateigentums an Produktionsmitteln. Innerhalb der formal sicheren Arbeitsverhältnisse konnten sich allerdings individuelle Initiativen und Leistungswillen nicht entfalten (Häder 1991: 4 Iff). Bürokratische Überreglementierung, schlechte Organisation, veraltete Technik und logistische Probleme haben maßgeblich dazu beigetragen. Die offiziell propagierten Leistungsnormen standen dem scheinbar unvermittelt gegenüber. Die Motivationsfunktion der Kollektiverwartungen dürfte als eher gering veranschlagt werden: Die Beschäftigten erwarteten vom Kollektiv soziale Einbindung und nicht die Bewertung individueller Leistungen. Die berufliche Mobilität war in der DDR in den 80er Jahren nur schwach ausgeprägt. Die Ursachen waren starre arbeitsrechtliche und tarifliche Regelungen und insbesondere ein chronischer Arbeitskräftemangel. Untersuchungen haben auch ergeben, daß die Anpassungsbereitschaft der Beschäftigten an berufliche Veränderungen nur gering war (Häder 1991: 48).

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This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour supply and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare provision are positively correlated with each other, while the gender wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fertility, female labour supply and childcare choices driven by cultural attitudes which fits these facts. There may exist multiple equilibria: one with zero childcare provision, low fertility and female labour supply and high wage gap and one with high childcare provision, high fertility and female labour supply and low wage gap.

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This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. Extended and harmonised data on effective redistribution recently provided by the newest version of the Standardized World Income Inequality Database allows for the assessment of the origins of governmental redistribution for a broad sample of countries. Our findings confirm the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis, pointing to a robust positive relationship between market inequality and redistribution. We show that perceptions of inequality are often biased and that the redistribution-enhancing effect of gross inequality is even stronger when individuals are aware of national income disparities. The results also suggest that top income shares tend to impede redistributive policies.

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This paper addresses the assertion that preferences for a comprehensive welfare state hamper and delay the emergence of a liberal-democratic culture in East Germany. Two questions are explored: first, has the impact of welfare-state values on support of the German democratic regime declined in East Germany since re-unification and adapted to the lower levels observed in West Germany? Second, are attitudes towards different welfare-state programmes equally important for citizens’ approval of the German democratic regime? Empirical analyses on the basis of representative public opinion surveys conducted between 1991 and 2012 confirm that the effect of welfare-state values in East Germany has converged to the smaller effect size observed in West Germany. Furthermore, attitudes to welfare-state programmes aimed at reducing income inequalities turn out to be a significant determinant of regime support in both parts of Germany. It is the higher demand for inequality-reducing governmental activities which still restrains the approval of the liberal-democratic regime among citizens in East Germany.

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Social health care systems around the world are inevitably confronted with the scarcity of resources and the resulting distributional challenges. Prioritization is applied in almost all countries, implicitly or explicitly, and shapes access to health services. We analyze and compare attitudes towards prioritization of medical treatments in a group of countries. The focus is on the criteria of age, the fact that a patient has or does not have young children or the fact that a patient is a strong smoker or a non-smoker. We use representative data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) of the year 2011 for nine countries (DE, US, GB, CH, NL, SE, NO, DK, AU). The empirical analysis reveals strong effects of socio-demographic factors and attitudes towards aspects of the health care system on individual’s acceptance of priority criteria. Among countries, Germans exhibit the highest aversion against priority setting whereas individuals from the US or GB are more in favor to prioritize according to the criteria smoking and age. However, a priority for patients with young children only receives support in Switzerland. Finally, we find evidence of egoistic motives for respondents’ acceptance of priority criteria.

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"Attitudes To Private and Public Ownership in East and West: Bulgaria, Poland, Australia and Finland, 1994/97" published on 01 Jan 1999 by Brill.

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Abstract. Modernization theory argues that, as societies industrialize and further develop, the influence of social background and other ascribed characteristi

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Abstract. This study examines the impact of class self-identification and class position on political attitudes in Great Britain, West Germany, Australia and the United States. The results show a basic similarity in the class structure of these four western nations, differences in patterns of class identification, and significant effects of class structure and class identification on political attitudes. Despite recent projections of its demise, for these four countries at least, class identification and class position are an important, albeit secondary, factor in explaining political attitudes. Of these class measures, class self-identification is the more salient in predicting political attitudes.

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The shape and aggregate output of welfare states within many developed democracies have been fairly resilient in the face of profound shifts in their national settings, and with respect to the global environment of the past 20 years. This contrasts with once-widespread predictions of universal retrenchment, and it has broadened debates over trends in social policymaking to focus on the phenomenon of welfare state persistence. Research on persistence has not, to date, directly considered the possibility that welfare states survive because of enduring popular support. Building from recent welfare state theory and the emerging literature on policy responsiveness, we consider the possibility that mass public opinion—citizens' aggregate policy preferences—are a factor behind welfare state persistence. We analyze a new country-level data set, controlling for established sources of welfare state development, and buttressing estimates by testing for endogeneity with respect to policy preferences. We find evidence that the temporal distribution of policy preferences has contributed to persistence tendencies in a number of welfare states. We discuss results in conclusion, suggesting the utility of further consideration of linkages between mass opinion and social policy in cross-national perspective.

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On the eve of the lecture by the authors of The Spirit Level at the University of Auckland in May 2014, Tim Hazledine pointed to a 2006 international survey which found that  New Zealanders were less supportive of redistributing income from the rich to the poor than people in most other nations in the survey. ‘I don’t think that leads to saying all is well’, Hazledine said. ‘I think inequality is a problem. But we have to understand why we tolerate it’; ‘We have to understand why we don’t have blood flowing in the streets’ (Collins, 2014).

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This article investigates which socio-economic and ideological factors make individuals support the normative principles of the welfare state. Two principal theoretical perspectives, relating to self-interest and the political ideology, respectively, have been proposed in the literature as causal explanations. However, as most studies utilize solely cross-sectional data, causal interpretations of which factors make people express support for the welfare state have so far been hard to sustain. This article, using panel data from the Canadian ‘Equality, Security, and Community’ survey and an extended random-effect model, exploits the longitudinal nature of the data and econometric methods to provide a more accurate analysis of the extent to which self-interest and political ideology actually determine support for welfare state principles. The empirical analysis indicates that both self-interest and political ideology variables to some extent are significant predictors of support for welfare state principles. In addition, the article discusses several avenues for future research.

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Oorschot W van, Meuleman B. Welfarism and the multidimensionality of welfare state legitimacy: evidence from The Netherlands, 2006 Is it possible that citizens who support a substantial role for government in the provision of welfare are, at the same time, critical about specific aspects of such provision? Based on confirmatory factor analyses, and using a 2006 Dutch survey, this study shows that welfare state legitimacy is indeed multidimensional, i.e. that opinions tend to cluster together in several dimensions referring to various aspects of the welfare state. There is partial evidence for the existence of a single, underlying welfarism dimension which consists basically of views regarding the range of governmental responsibility, as well as of the idea that these governmental provisions do not have unfavourable repercussions in economic or moral spheres. However, the separate dimensions cannot be reduced entirely to this overall welfarism dimension. This is illustrated by the finding that the various attitude dimensions are affected differently by socio-structural position and ideological dispositions.

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Refugee and labour immigration have placed the issue of immigrants' access to welfare benefits high on the political agenda. This article explores how voter preferences for increases in the child benefit change when respondents are reminded about immigrants' access to benefits. The survey experiment shows that information about newly arrived immigrants' access to child benefit has only a small impact on support for increasing the child allowance. By contrast, information about labour migrants' access to benefits for children living in another European Union country has a strong impact, and the observed sensitivity to this cue is not to the same extent confined to respondents who otherwise support welfare dualism.

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Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.

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Immigration has been a major trend in the last decades in Europe. However, immigrant access to the social security systems has remained a contentious issue having gained additional salience in light of the recent asylum-seeking developments. We focus on welfare chauvinism, the idea that immigrants should not participate in welfare resources, as an attitudinal dimension. We seek to answer two primary questions: To what extent are different types of objective and subjective material deprivation related to welfare chauvinism? What is the role of the recent asylum seeker influx? Using European Social Survey data and employing binary and generalized ordered logit models with country fixed effects, we find perceptions of deprivation to be more meaningful than objective factors related to potential job loss, and some relationships depend on the specific type of deprivation. On the country level, in line with the deservingness of asylum seekers as a group, higher levels of asylum seeking are related to lower levels of welfare chauvinism, while GDP per capita is not associated with welfare chauvinism. Finally, the generalized ordered logit model shows that some relationships vary according to the strictness of welfare chauvinism, which would not be visible in a conventional ordered logit model.

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This article examines the link between regime types, social expenditure, and welfare attitudes. By employing data on 19 countries taken from the World Values Survey, the main aim is to see to what degree the institutions of a country affect the attitudes of its citizens. According to Esping-Andersen (The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990) welfare regimes can be classified into Liberal, Conservative, and Social Democratic categories. With this as my point of departure, I put forward two research questions: the first concerns the direct influence of regime type on people’s attitudes; the second seeks to trace the contours of the regime types by arguing that both social expenditure and welfare attitudes are products of a country’s institutional arrangements. These questions are answered through regression modelling and by examining the interplay between welfare attitudes, social expenditure, and welfare regimes. First, we see that there are significant differences in aggregated attitudes between countries belonging to the Liberal and the Conservative regimes, with the former’s citizens holding more rightist views than those of the latter. This is explained by the history and organization of welfare benefits of the two variations of Esping-Andersen’s classification. Second, by graphing welfare attitudes against social expenditure the outline of the three regime types mentioned above may be seen. Similar correspondence is not found with regards to an Eastern European category. All in all, this study renders some support for the regime argument.

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This article is an attempt to identify the role of politically relevant values and attitudes in voting behaviour in the Czech Republic. In view of the results of earlier analyses, which show there has been a process of intense crystallization of left–right political axis of the Czech political spectrum, this paper aims to demonstrate the specific roles of declared and value-based left–right political orientations, the effects of external and internal political efficacy, the feelings of anomie, and the required role of state. The analysis of data from the ISSP survey carried out at the end of 1996 shows that a person's declared position on the left–right axis of political orientation has far stronger influence on voting behaviour than does his or her position on the left–right scale based on socio-economic values traditionally underlying left–right political orientations. This difference indicates, among other things, that in the Czech Republic the declared right-wing political orientations so far acted as barrier to voting for left-wing political parties, for which people would likely vote if they voted according to their value-based left-wing orientations.

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Abstract. Previous studies find little evidence that welfare regimes affect public support for welfare state principles, policies, and programmes in any system

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In a democratic society, public policy must claim to provide what people want. One clue to this is the evidence of opinion surveys. Yet, in the field of welfare, surveys set policy analysts a puzzle: evidence about attitudes to what government should be providing displays an ambiguity. Some surveys demonstrate popular preferences for market provision, suppressed to a considerable extent by the coercive system of tax-financed state welfare, and others reveal a high level of satisfaction with and support for existing public welfare services. Both sets of opinions are tinged with a moralistic concern about the regulation of state services for stereotyped undeserving scroungers. The paper suggests that this ambivalence in findings is not simply the result of methodological difficulties: it may reflect an ambiguity in many people's attitudes in this area that is founded on the contrast between the ideology of individual self-interest prevalent in a market society and awareness of common needs for collective provision. Both aspects contribute to people's framework of ideas about the proper role of the state. Evidence from a recent survey is analysed to highlight the contradiction, and support this interpretation.

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This paper draws on a literature in sociology, psychology and economics that has extensively documented the unfulfilled promise of meritocracy in education. I argue that the lesson learned from this literature is threefold: (1) educational institutions in practice significantly distort the ideal meritocratic process; (2) opportunities for merit are themselves determined by non-meritocratic factors; (3) any definition of merit must favor some groups in society while putting others at a disadvantage. Taken together, these conclusions give reason to understand meritocracy not just as an unfulfilled promise, but as an unfulfillable promise. Having problematized meritocracy as an ideal worth striving for, I argue that the pervasiveness of meritocratic policies in education threatens to crowd out as principles of justice, need and equality. As such, it may pose a barrier rather than a route to equality of opportunity. Furthermore, meritocratic discourse legitimates societal inequalities as justly deserved such as when misfortune is understood as personal failure. The paper concludes by setting a research agenda that asks how citizens come to hold meritocratic beliefs; addresses the persistence of (unintended) meritocratic imperfections in schools; analyzes the construction of a legitimizing discourse in educational policy; and investigates how education selects and labels winners and losers.

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Abstract. Why do some people support government redistribution more than others? This article addresses this question with reference to attitudes towards redis

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Welfare state support has two core dimensions: attitudes about what the welfare state should do and beliefs about its actual performance. People can combine any position on one dimension with any position on the other, yielding four opinion clusters: people can combine preferences for a relatively strong role of the welfare state with a perception of a relatively low or high welfare state performance; likewise, people preferring a small role of the welfare state can perceive a high or low performing welfare state. We apply Latent Class Factor Analysis to data of 22 European countries from the 2008/9 European Social Survey. We find that each of the four clusters contains a substantial proportion of respondents that differs between welfare regimes. In addition, cluster membership is also related to covariates that measure people's structural positions and ideological preferences.

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This article presents a national measure of Americans' level of concern about economic inequality from 1966 to 2015, and analyzes the relationship between this construct and public support for government intervention in the economy. Current research argues that concerns about economic inequality are associated with a desire for increased government action, but this relationship has only been formally tested using cross-sectional analyses. I first use a form of dynamic factor analysis to develop a measure of national concern over time. Using an error correction model I then show that an increase in national concern about economic inequality does not lead to a subsequent increase in support for government intervention in the economy. Instead there is some evidence that, once confounding factors are accounted for, an increase in concern could lead to reduced support for government intervention.

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AS EUROPEAN INTEGRATION BECOMES AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT public policy issue facing both the country and its political leaders, the degree to which Britain can or should harmonize its welfare, employment and taxation policies with those of other EU members will receive progressively more attention. In this context and with the evident importance of opinion poll popularity for the main political parties’ pursuit of electoral success, public opinion on issues concerning welfare, taxation and redistribution is likely to have considerable bearing on the viability of Britain's incorporation of the legislation and practices endorsed in other EU member states. Nonetheless, even a cursory examination of evidence on the public's attitude on questions relating to these changes suggests integration is unlikely to follow a smoothly negotiated path. Responses to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, for example, show that, while holding mixed attitudes towards the idea of European integration and only mildly negative attitudes to EU inf hence over policies concerning pollution, immigration and defence, the British public are strongly opposed to EU influence over taxation and, to some degree, employment policy. Even among those people who endorsed the general aim of European integration, only a minority – in the case of taxation, a very small minority – found the idea of Europeanlevel decision-making acceptable.

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This article attempts to forge new links between social attitudes and social policy change in Australia. Drawing on four survey waves of international social survey data and using multivariable regression analysis, this article sheds new light on the determinants of Australian attitudes towards the welfare state in a comparative perspective. It examines their variations across time and social groupings and then compares Australian welfare attitudes with those found in other leading western economies. While there is popular support for government actions to protect Australian citizens in old age and sickness, views about social protection and labour market policy for the working-age population are divided. The comparative analysis and the focus on class-attitude linkages allows for further critical reflection on the nature of social relations and recent social reforms enacted by the Liberal-National coalition government.

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"We all know that the actual process of empirical research is a messy, complicated business that at best only approximates the models we impart to students. Research Confidential pulls back the curtain on this process, laying bare the sordid details of the research process, but doing so in a way that respects the ideals of social research and that provides useful lessons for young scholars. It should be required reading for our research methods courses." ---Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania "In this impressive volume, some of the brightest young lights in social research have taken us backstage to share what they learned from their innovative projects. Besides providing a wealth of help with methodological concerns, the book includes theoretical and career issues to consider when doing research. Anyone doing research should benefit from reading it." ---Caroline Hodges Persell, Professor of Sociology, New York University "Research Confidential complements existing methods literature by providing refreshingly honest accounts of key challenges and decision forks-in-the-research-road. Each chapter enlightens and entertains." ---Kirsten Foot, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Washington "A must-read for researchers embarking on new projects. Rather than the abstract descriptions of most methods textbooks, this volume provides rich accounts of the firsthand experiences of actual researchers. An invaluable resource of practical advice. Critically, it will make new researchers aware of the actual challenges that they are likely to face in their work." ---Christopher Winship, editor of Sociological Methods and Research and Professor of Sociology, Harvard University This collection of essays aims to fill a notable gap in the existing literature on research methods in the social sciences. While the methods literature is extensive, rarely do authors discuss the practical issues and challenges they routinely confront in the course of their research projects. As a result, editor Eszter Hargittai argues, each new cohort is forced to reinvent the wheel, making mistakes that previous generations have already confronted and resolved. Research Confidential seeks to address this failing by supplying new researchers with the kind of detailed practical information that can make or break a given project. Written in an informal, accessible, and engaging manner by a group of prominent young scholars, many of whom are involved in groundbreaking research in online contexts, this collection promises to be a valuable tool for graduate students and educators across the social sciences. Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Cover art courtesy of Dustin Gerard

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This volume addresses issues of justice and legitimacy in the context of welfare state transformation.Leading international experts including Knut Halvorsen, Robert Y. Shapiro, Stefan Svallfors and Wim van Oorschot, demonstrate that the Western welfare state is not at risk of losing support or encountering fundamental opposition, yet does face serious challenges such as growing social and ethnic diversity, new social risks, fiscal constraints and contested notions of justice. The book is focused on four main aspects: attitude formation in cross-national perspective; the just distribution of burdens and benefits; political factors mediating the effects of social attitudes on public policy; and, challenges to the welfare state stemming from immigration and ethnic diversity.The volume contributes to the growing body of literature which takes up the issue of the public standing of the welfare state from a comparative perspective.

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An extensive literature exists hypothesizing a negative association between immigration and a multitude of social goods issues. Recent analyses, however, have established that the perception of the size of the immigrant population may be more relevant than the actual size of the population in shaping attitudes, and that the effect of immigration on social policy attitudes may be more salient at the local—or even neighborhood—level than at the country-level. In extending this work, we examine how perceptions and misperceptions about the size of the immigrant population affect attitudes about redistribution and social policies within one of the most diverse and ethnically heterogeneous immigrant cities in the world, New York City. We analyzed data from a diverse sample of 320 NYC residents recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk who responded to a series of questions regarding their perceptions of the size of the immigrant population of their neighborhood before indicating their redistributive and social policy preferences. We found that about a quarter of New Yorkers overestimated the size of the non-citizen population, though the proportion was lower than those in studies of other geographic units. In addition, those that perceived a lower citizen proportion or overestimated the size of the non-citizen population were the least supportive of redistribution and social policies. Implications for the existing research on the relationship between immigration and social policy preferences are discussed.

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A comparative analysis of the political attitudes, values, aspirations, and identities of citizens in advanced industrial societies, this book focusses on the different ways in which social policies and national politics affect personal opinions on justice, political responsibility, and the overall trustworthiness of politicians.

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Economic and governmental reforms typically coincide with political and perceptional changes among the population, either preceding or following them. Radical systemic change in a country's governance may reflect or trigger similarly rapid and fundamental changes in attitudes and behaviours among citizens. Using the International Social Survey, this paper analyses reported attitudes to social inequality and work orientations in European post-communist countries, monitoring those reported immediately after the introduction of market economies (in and around 1990) to more recent years (up to 2005). The emerging patterns are compared with those reported in Western European market economies around the same time in order to observe the extent to which, if at all, popular attitudes in old and new market economies have aligned following regime changes.

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[This analysis demonstrates that important implications of the multidimensional voting model are robust to significant changes in the model's assumptions. (1) If candidates in the model are allowed to be partially or totally interested in the election's policy outcomes, convergence to the median must still occur. (2) If candidates are uncertain about voters' responses, and therefore attempt to maximize the probability of winning, the candidate platforms should still converge in equilibrium under weak assumptions about symmetry of the candidates' situations. (3) If both of these nonstandard assumptions are made together, the convergence result no longer holds; but small departures from the classic assumptions lead to only small departures from convergence. In combination with other recent multidimensional voting models that examine behavior in the absence of a median, this study indicates the usefulness of the traditional model for conceptualizing electoral politics.]

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Response bias and notably response falsification undercut the usefulness of opinion polls in characterizing collective American attitudes toward social welfare. The attitudes polled in surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Studies (NSS) appear to be customarily sensitive, often evidencing very large amounts of response falsification that obscure the degree of consensus for America's bifurcated social welfare system. Response bias and falsification greatly affect self-reports of family income, drinking and drug abuse, sex behavior, voting, and a large number of other attitudes central to the provision of social welfare. The problems of response bias may be intractable and attention might profitably return to traditional scholarship that attends to actual collective choices, e.g., legislation, as still imperfect but more reliable estimates of the national will.

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Aggregated data on regions within countries have been used to analyze the effect of religion and religiosity on aggregate support for redistribution. The data are from the International Social Survey Programme and a panel data set was constructed at the level of regions that were observed several times over the period 1985?2010. Empirical analyses show that a higher share of Catholics within a region has a positive effect on aggregate support for redistribution; a higher share of Protestants has a negative effect; religiosity (measured by church attendance) has no effect; and the effect of a religious denomination is non-linear and depends on whether or not it has a weak or a strong presence in a region. It was also found that Scandinavia is unusual in combining a high share of Protestants with high aggregate support for redistribution.

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We study attitude toward redistribution by local policy-makers in the context of public childcare in Italy. Within a substantially homogeneous legislative framework, different municipalities autonomously define how participation fees vary with a compound indicator of income and wealth (ISEE), thus redistributing resources across households using the service. The nearly one hundred municipalities we take into account exhibit wide heterogeneity in redistributive attitudes. We find statistically significant correlations with a number of individual characteristics of policy-makers and municipalities, but not with those of the ex ante distribution of income, which should be central according to both normative and positive theory. Since the price of public childcare is subsidized, resources are also redistributed from taxpayers to users. The evidence we find is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of redistribution is a public good.

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In an article published in this Journal, we have examined whether American welfare recipients possess beliefs and attitudes that differ from mainstream public opinion. Although our findings cast doubt on the existence of a widespread ‘culture of dependence’, we do show that programme beneficiaries exhibit self-interested support for government policies that provide assistance to needy segments of the population. However, our analysis – like most others on this topic – assumes that welfare participation affects opinions and not vice versa. This is problematic because there are theoretical reasons to believe that influences flow in the opposite direction, as well. Therefore, some important questions remain to be answered: is it really the case that welfare participation, itself, shapes the outlook of programme beneficiaries? Or do political attitudes affect reliance on public assistance in the first place?In this Research Note, we examine the underlying structure of the relationship between welfare participation and attitudes towards government activity. Our analysis uses the 1992 Center for Political Studies (CPS) National Election Study, the same dataset employed in the earlier article. But, we test a statistical model that allows for reciprocal influences between welfare and public opinion. The empirical results reinforce the earlier conclusion that welfare participation has an impact on mass attitudes. Conversely, political attitudes have no effect on whether citizens use public aid. Mirroring our earlier work, we find that people who rely on governmental assistance take rational, self-interested positions on the public policy issues which operate to their own direct benefit.

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In economic hard-times, do Americans call for increases in governmental assistance, or do they clamor for declines in government assistance? We address this question by identifying the impact of state-level macroeconomic conditions on public support for social welfare spending. We analyze individual-level data from the 1984–2000 National Election Studies, combined with state-level macroeconomic indicators of inflation, unemployment, and productivity. We find that state-level inflation, not state-level unemployment nor state-level productivity, consistently and consequentially shapes citizens’ support for social welfare. With rising inflation, Americans become more supportive of means-tested social welfare spending. Our analyses generally reaffirm the value Americans place on the social welfare safety net, especially during times of economic duress. When the going gets tough, Americans reach out, rather than pull back.

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The two main political parties in the United States in the period 1976–1992 put forth policies on redistribution and on issues pertaining directly to race. We argue that redistributive politics in the US can be fully understood only by taking account of the interconnection between these issues in political competition. We identify two mechanisms through which racism among American voters decreases the degree of redistribution that would otherwise obtain. In common with others, we suggest that voter racism decreases the degree of redistribution due to an anti-solidarity effect: that (some) voters oppose government transfer payments to minorities whom they view as undeserving. We suggest a second effect as well: that some voters who desire redistribution nevertheless vote for the anti-redistributive (Republican) party because its position on the race issue is more consonant with their own, and this, too, decreases the degree of redistribution in political equilibrium. This we name the policy bundle effect. We propose a formal model of multi-dimensional political competition that enables us to estimate the magnitude of these two effects, and estimate the model for the period in question. We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18% points; the total effect decomposes about equally into the two sub-effects. We also find that the Democratic vote share is 5–38% points lower than it would have been, absent racism. The magnitude of this effect would seem to explain the difference between the sizes of the public sector in the US and northern European countries.

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This article introduces a racialized conflict theory to explain how racial divisions structure welfare state development in the absence of de jure discrimination. The author explains the effect of racial divisions on policy outcomes as the result of the attitudinal, cultural, and political spillover effects of prevailing conflicts in a social field. Using a paired-case comparison and analysis of multiple data sources, the author applies this theory to analyze Georgia?s and Alabama?s surprisingly divergent welfare reforms in the 1990s. Results support the racialized conflict theory and suggest important revisions to prevailing theories about the sociopolitical effects of contemporary racial divides.

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This article examines the role of racial attitudes in shaping white Americans' opposition to welfare. Past research on welfare views has focused on economic self-interest, individualism, and egalitarianism. Using a covariance structure model, I confirm the significance of these factors, but find that racial attitudes are in fact the most important source of opposition to welfare among whites. In addition, racial attitudes influence the pattern of support white Americans express toward various aspects of the welfare state: negative attitudes toward blacks lead many whites who support spending for education, health care, and the elderly to oppose means-tested programs aimed exclusively at the poor. Finally, this research carries implications for broader theories of race and politics. Contrary to the suggestion that traditional racial prejudice is no longer a potent force in American politics, I show that at least one aspect of traditional prejudice--the stereotype of blacks as lazy--is still widespread and continues to have a profound impact on whites' political thinking.

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With the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization.

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Rising levels of income inequality in almost all industrialized countries as a consequence of globalization and de-industrialization might lead one to assume that voters will demand more redistribution and exert influence on their governments to set up redistributive programmes. However, this is not always the case. Citizens do not react directly to actual levels of inequality, as research on the attitudes towards inequality and redistribution has shown. In this article the complex relation between cross-national variation of inequality and public support for redistribution is analysed. The article draws on explanations from both a political economy perspective as well as drawing on comparative welfare regime research. While the former conceives cross-national variations in support for redistribution as the aggregate effect of a demand of rational actors reacting to country context, the latter focuses on the impact of institutions and culture superimposing itself over self-interest. The empirical analysis tests the explanations of both the political economy and welfare regimes approach. Since the article focuses on the impact of context variables on individual attitudes, a multilevel analysis is adopted. Data are taken from the 1999 ‘International Social Survey Program’ and are complemented by macro-economic variables. Based on the results, a model of contingent support for redistribution is put forward, where culturally influenced definitions are embedded in economic processes.

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This article contributes to the scant knowledge about what people believe to be the economic, moral, social and migration consequences of the welfare state. Data from a 2006 Dutch survey show, first, that in the eyes of most Dutch people the positive social consequences of the welfare state outweigh the negative economic and moral consequences. Second, the personal interests that people may have in the provisions made by the welfare state, for instance arising from the level of their income, play a minor role in understanding differences in perceptions. Instead, a set of ideational determinants proved to be more important. Consequence perceptions are consistently influenced by people’s political stance, perceptions of the deservingness of welfare target groups and their attitudes towards the role of government.

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Abstract. A public opinion poll was conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County, California, to determine public attitudes on welfare. It wa

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The method in which a government policy is delivered—for example, as a tax break rather than a direct payment—could potentially have significant implications for how the public views that policy. This is an especially important consideration given the importance of indirect policy approaches like tax breaks to modern American governance. We employ a series of survey experiments to test whether citizens react more favorably to tax breaks than to equivalent spending programs. We find that citizens prefer tax breaks, particularly when they are the established means of intervention. When direct intervention is the status quo, or when any government involvement on the issue is unfamiliar, the preference is reduced. We also find an interactive effect for ideology, with conservatives strongly preferring tax breaks to direct intervention, though the effect is still present among liberals. This study establishes the importance of delivery mechanism to citizens' policy preferences and suggests that the policy status quo structures citizens' perceptions of policy proposals.

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The demographic changes that have occurred in European countries in recent decades have made the policies of the public pension system one of the most debated issues of the welfare state. In this paper, I focus on preferences for three pension policy reforms with different distributive consequences: raising contributions, raising the age of retirement, and allowing free choice between public and private pension plans. I use multilevel models to analyse how individual attachment to different solidarity principles (universalistic, conservative, liberal and familistic) affects attitudes toward pension system reforms while controlling for institutional factors. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that solidarity principles have a significant influence on individual preferences. I find that individuals who adhere to universalistic or conservative principles are more in favour of increasing contributions in order to maintain the level of pensions, whereas they oppose a postponement of retirement age. In contrast, those who adhere to liberal or familistic principles are against increasing contributions and prefer extending retirement age. The findings at least partially support the ?regime hypothesis?, as a more generous pension system appears to increase support for raising contributions while decreasing support for a raise in the age of retirement.

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:A review of public opinion and focus-group research reveals consistently inadequate understanding of Medicare by the public and misinterpretation of public opinion information by policy advocates. Closer analysis of apparent conflicts in values related to self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and government, however, reveals strong support for the basic premises of social insurance embodied in Medicare. The likelihood of meaningful policy discussions about Medicare depends, in part, on whether the policy and research communities can find ways to provide the electorate with the knowledge they need to understand the implications of reform.

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European citizens are largely unfavourable to immigration. These restrictive attitudes are linked to such factors as the unemployment rate and risk of poverty, as well as to competition for employment and welfare resources. Refuting insider/outsider theories, this article shows, via an analysis of recent European Social Surveys, that national social protection policies can reduce hostility towards immigration, insofar as they moderate social inequality and the risk of poverty. Ethnic and racial differences are problematic for the ‘egalitarian compromise’ underpinning the welfare state. Nonetheless, strong trade unions and social protection policies are associated with greater integration of immigrants. Over time, the future sustainability of welfare systems may depend on the participation of immigrants as a political force, making their integration even more important.

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We experimentally study the impact of public opinion poll releases on voter turnout and welfare in a participation game. We find higher overall turnout rates when polls inform the electorate about the levels of support for the candidates than when polls are prohibited. Distinguishing between allied and floating voters, our data show that this increase in turnout is entirely due to floating voters. When polls indicate equal levels of support for the candidates, turnout is high and welfare is low (compared to the situation without polls). In contrast, when polls reveal more unequal levels of support, turnout is lower with than without this information, while the effect of polls on welfare is nonnegative. Finally, many of our results are well predicted by quantal response (logit) equilibrium.

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In the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, welfare states have entered a new phase of austerity. Simultaneously, new social risks and the rise of the knowledge economy fuel new demands on the welfare state. We analyse how demands for social investment policies – particularly education – come into conflict with budgetary concerns, using new survey data on individual-level preferences in eight European countries. Paying particular attention to fiscal and budgetary trade-offs, we find that social investments are generally very popular, but as soon as realistic budget constraints are added, public support drops considerably. The largest drop occurs when social investments would be financed with cutbacks in social transfers rather than higher taxes or higher public debt levels. Furthermore, when studying the determinants of preferences, we find that in the era of permanent austerity distributive conflicts within welfare states exhibit a different political dynamic than conflicts about the size of the welfare state.

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This paper examines the nature of public opinion concerning the National Health Service. Data from two series of national surveys covering the period 1983–92 are used to analyse trends in opinion. OPCS data for 1991–2 are examined in more detail to investigate the determinants of satisfaction with health services. A range of demographic, socio-economic and health status characteristics, as well as media coverage of health-related issues, are found to be significantly related to expressions of satisfaction with the NHS, in addition to recent experience of using health services. The complexity of the formation and expression of public opinion is acknowledged. In particular, the importance of taking note of the methodological implications and political context associated with expressions of public opinion is emphasised.

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Empirical studies over the last ten years indicate that the public in general still supports the welfare state but not necessarily its beneficiaries nor the allocations required to sustain its activities. Since most of these studies focused only on selected aspects of the welfare state their data do not provide a widespread and comprehensive overview of public opinion regarding the welfare state and its internal dynamics. This article focuses on public opinion with regard to the major components of the welfare state. The sample is drawn from a large urban population in Israel. For each component of the welfare state, three dimensions are studied: governmental allocation, quality of service and number of beneficiaries. The results indicate that public opinion with regard to the various elements of the welfare state is differential and distinct.

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The passage of the GST legislation through the Senate brings to an end 25 years of debate over whether Australia should radically alter its tax system. This paper investigates the empirical problem of whether there were patterns of public opinion indicating that voters may have been averse to one particular aspect of taxation more than any other. The paper also addresses the methodological problems involved in investigating the suggestion that voters expressed intransitive preferences in regard to taxing and spending.

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ALAN D. MONROE; Public Opinion and Public Policy, 1980-1993 , Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 May 1998, Pages 6–28, https://doi.org/10.1086/297

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If the American citizen is capable of constructing reliable political judgments without engaging in extensive cognitive deliberation, then criticism that public opinion is largely vacuous in character may overstate the implications of a politically inattentive citizenry. Heuristic processing, reliance on simple rules of judgment, provides a cognitive mechanism that may enable citizens to advance informed yet efficient issue appraisals. More specifically, application of heuristic processing to source cues—references to prominent political leaders—can allow individuals to extend evaluations of those leaders to the policies and issues with which they are associated. In this paper, discussion of heuristic principles of judgment facilitates specification of the expected relationship between source cues and two component processes of individual-level public opinion: opinion holding and opinion direction. Separate quasi-experimental analyses yield evidence consistently supportive of the heuristic perspective.

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Social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro level. We expand this perspective by studying public opinion towards social investment compared to other welfare policies, exploiting new public opinion data from eight European countries. We identify three latent dimensions of welfare state preferences: ‘social investment’; ‘passive transfers’; and ‘workfare’ policies. We find that social investment is far more popular compared to the other two. Furthermore, we identify distinct supporting groups: passive transfer policies are most supported by low-income, low-educated people, by individuals leaning towards traditional social values and by those subscribing to left-wing economic attitudes. Social investment policies are supported by a broad coalition of individuals with higher educational backgrounds and left-libertarian views from all economic strata. Workfare policies are most popular with high-income individuals and those subscribing to economically conservative and traditional authoritarian values.

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This article provides data and insights into Israeli public opinion about the welfare state and social policy. The study included 940 respondents who reported their attitudes towards various issues related to the welfare state. The study was conducted in spring 2008 prior to the current economic crisis. The findings show that, to a large extent, the Israeli public justifies state intervention in the supply of public services, supports public investment in services related to the welfare state, and recognizes the obligation to support those in need. As for various policy areas, the Israeli public regards education as a top priority, believing that investment in public education is likely to lead to achievements in other areas such as security and health. However, when asked about their willingness to pay more taxes for services related to the welfare state, respondents tended to be less enthusiastic. The research points to a significant gap between the social and economic policies in the past decade and the attitudes of large parts of Israeli society towards the welfare state. We provide possible explanations for that gap.

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The drivers of public support for redistributive policy have stimulated academic debate around the world. The majority of studies use cross-country surveys conducted in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries to contribute to the debate on whether self-interest or social values have more influence on public attitudes towards redistribution. Drawing on a phone survey conducted in 2013, this study advances the discussion by investigating public attitudes towards redistribution and social policy changes against the backdrop of buoyant government revenues in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong welfare model, best seen as a parallel to the liberal welfare state, is selective and residual. Contrary to the usual assumption, the social values hypothesis, viewing poverty as societal problems instead of individual reasons, has been supported in the Hong Kong context. It lends support to greater redistribution in a residual welfare state. The policy implications of the findings are also discussed.

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This article examines comparative research in the field as far as it relates to attitudes towards welfare policies and the (re)distribution of resources and life chances. First, it presents the first generation of comparative welfare attitude research, in which national surveys on the topic were established and could be compared. It then moves on to survey the turn towards explicitly comparative studies, and in particular extensive research on the link between welfare regimes and attitudinal patterns. Furthermore, recent developments in attitude studies beyond the welfare regimes framework are reported. It is shown that institutional analyses are still highly useful in clarifying the mechanisms behind the formation of welfare state attitudes. Finally, a section preceding the conclusion highlights important challenges for the future. The field of comparative welfare attitudes has become explicitly comparative using country variation as a key analytical tool.

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We model inter-individual differences in preferences for redistribution as a function of (a) self-interest; (b) ideas about the deservingness of income differences due to luck, effort and talent; (c) subjective perceptions of the relative importance of these determinants for explaining the actual income distribution. Individuals base the latter on information obtained from their reference group. We analyse the consequences for redistributive preferences of homophilous reference group formation based on talent. Our model makes it possible to understand and integrate some of the main insights from the empirical literature. We illustrate with GSS data from 1987 how our model may help in structuring empirical work.

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Abstract. We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how demand for redistribution of income depends on self-interest, insurance motives, and social concerns

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This paper studies attitudes towards income redistribution in the country of originamong those who stay in a welfare state, and those who emigrate. We find a strikinggender difference among Danish emigrants. Majority of men opposes increasing incomeredistribution, while majority of women supports it. Women are somewhat more positivetowards redistribution also in Denmark, but the gender difference is much smaller.We study to what extent differences in attitudes towards redistribution are driven bybeliefs about the determinants of individual success, generalized trust, assimilation tothe new home country, and self-selection of emigrants to the United States and otherdestinations. We do not find evidence of assimilation to political values prevalent in thenew home country.

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This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion-policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion-policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion-policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross-national data are cross-sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross-national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion-policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.

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Recent decades have seen increased interest in public attitudes towards public pension policies. Most previous research, however, relies heavily on dependent variables that fail to reflect the effective alternatives being discussed in most affluent democracies. This article seeks to improve our understanding of public attitudes towards pragmatic welfare policy options by examining cross-national differences in attitudes towards (i) cuts in old-age pension benefits, (ii) increases in social security contributions, and (iii) increases in the statutory retirement age. We test predictions of the dominant positive policy feedback theory and the alternative negative policy feedback theory. These approaches argue that policies induce consequences and attitudes that reinforce (positive feedback) or undermine (negative feedback) past policymaking trajectories. Empirical results obtained by multilevel analyses from a sample of 27 European countries are consistent mainly with the negative feedback approach. In countries with higher statutory retirement ages, citizens are more likely to support a postponement of retirement. However, in countries with higher elderly poverty, citizens are less likely to support cuts in pension benefits. In countries with higher social security contributions, citizens are less likely to support further increases in these contributions.

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In the scientific and the public debate demographic ageing is sometimes perceived as an unstoppable “grey tide” which will inevitably lead to a conflict between the old and young generation. In this paper we empirically evaluate whether we find any evidence for an intergenerational conflict in Europe and which factors might influence its severity. In particular, we answer the following questions. (1) Is there a conflict between the interests of the younger and the older generation? (2) Does the strength of the conflict increase with population ageing? And finally, (3) can a policy of Active Ageing, i.e. better integrating older generations into society, moderate the conflict? We answer these questions in a comparative study of 27 European countries using data from the Eurobarometer 2009. Our results show a moderate conflict between generations. Compared to spending preferences of the younger generation, older people are more likely to support increased spending for old age at the expense of educational spending. Contrary to expectation, generational conflict does not increase with population ageing. Linking country differences in the strength of the generational conflict to the degree of population ageing with multilevel regression techniques we do not find any evidence that the conflict is increasing In a final step of our analysis we evaluate the potential of generational policies - measured with the Active Aging Index - to mitigate the generational conflict. Intergenerational conflict is weaker when older people actively participate in the political life and are visible in society, suggesting Active Aging policies as a means to mitigate intergenerational conflict

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This article analyzes the relationship between political trust, ideology, and public support for tax cutting. Conceptualizing tax cuts as government action under conditions of risk, I argue that political trust should increase rather than decrease public support for tax cutting, particularly among those for whom endorsement of tax cuts entails ideological sacrifice. The results show that political trust increases support for a variety of tax cut initiatives, but only among liberals. The results further suggest that trust is an instrumental resource that can bolster support for a conservative as well as a liberal policy agenda.

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This article examines the link between citizens' policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for public investments thus depends on whether the institutional context makes elites' policy promises credible. We consider hypotheses about how the institutional allocation of authority and the institutional rules governing implementation affect citizen support for public investment, and we find broad support for the framework in three survey experiments administered to representative samples of U.S. citizens. The results shed light on the link between political institutions and citizens' attitudes, the capacities of voters for substantive political reasoning, and the political prospects for public investment.

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In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right-oriented react thermostatically and the left-oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.

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An enduring and increasingly acute concern—in an age of polarized parties—is that people's partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. For example, research suggests that a Democrat may support a policy proposed by Democrats, but oppose the same policy if proposed by Republicans. However, a related body of literature suggests that how people respond to information and form preferences is distorted by their prior issue attitudes. In neither instance is information even-handedly evaluated, rather, it is interpreted in light of partisanship or existing issue opinions. Both effects are well documented in isolation, but in most political scenarios individuals consider both partisanship and prior opinions—yet, these dynamics may or may not pull toward the same preference. Using nationally representative experiments focused on tax and education policies, I introduce and test a theory that isolates when: partisanship dominates preference formation, partisanship and issue opinions reinforce or offset each other, and issue attitudes trump partisanship. The findings make clear that the public does not blindly follow party elites. Depending on elite positions, the level of partisan polarization, and personal importance of issues, the public can be attentive to information and shirk the influence of party elites. The results have broad implications for political parties and citizen competence in contemporary democratic politics.

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Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the authors model trends in issue partisanship?the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification?and issue alignment?the correlation between pairs of issues?and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little evidence of issue alignment. The findings suggest that opinion changes correspond more to a resorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines. Levels of constraint vary across population subgroups: strong partisans and wealthier and politically sophisticated voters have grown more coherent in their beliefs. The authors discuss the consequences of partisan realignment and group sorting on the political process and potential deviations from the classic pluralistic account of American politics.

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Korpi and Palme's (1998) classic “The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality” claims that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor. This article revisits Korpi and Palme's classic, and in the process, explores and informs a set of enduring questions about social policy, politics, and social equality. Specifically, we investigate the relationships between three dimensions of welfare transfers—transfer share (the average share of household income from welfare transfers), low-income targeting, and universalism—and poverty and preferences for redistribution. We analyze rich democracies like Korpi and Palme, but we also generalize to a broader sample of developed and developing countries. Consistent with Korpi and Palme, we show (1) poverty is negatively associated with transfer share and universalism; (2) redistribution preferences are negatively associated with low-income targeting; and (3) universalism is positively associated with transfer share. Contrary to Korpi and Palme, redistribution preferences are not related to transfer share or universalism; and low-income targeting is neither positively associated with poverty nor negatively associated with transfer share. Therefore, instead of the “paradox of redistribution” we propose two new paradoxes of social policy: non-complementarity and undermining. The non-complementarity paradox entails a mismatch between the dimensions that matter to poverty and the dimension that matters to redistribution preferences. The undermining paradox emphasizes that the dimension (transfer share) that most reduces poverty tends to increase with the one dimension (low-income targeting) that reduces support for redistribution.

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The question of who should be responsible for the provision of retirement income is becoming increasingly important, given the general trend of ageing populations in many European countries. In this article, we study the determinants of popular preferences concerning individual or collective responsibilities in the context of old-age pensions. Using data from the Eurobarometer survey series, we investigate whether - and to what extent - people's views about who should be responsible for the provision of pensions are related to market selectivist and collectivist features of the particular welfare state regimes in Europe. Moreover, the impact of structural characteristics of pension systems and social characteristics of individuals on public preferences is investigated. The cross-national patterns of popular views on responsibilities for the provision of pensions suggest a link to the specifics of welfare state regimes, but not as decisively as one would expect. Structural characteristics of pension systems also appear to be important determinants of public opinion. However, effects of contextual variables are only found when measurements of public opinion are used, which refer to specific institutional arrangements for pension provision. Finally, the results show important divisions among social categories.

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How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed-methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political-institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how—in combination—these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.

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Individuals reject economic inequality if they believe it to result from unequal opportunities. This paper argues income gaps between groups determined at birth, based on sex, race, or family background, can serve people as an indication of unequal opportunities. Findings from a survey experiment show Americans underestimate these gaps. When confronted with accurate information, participants correct their perceptions and adjust redistributive preferences. A follow-up survey finds these effects to last for over one year. In sum, this paper contributes to political economy scholarship that links individual preferences to objective characteristics of the income distribution. Focusing on income gaps offers new ways to explore the political consequences of structural economic change.

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In recent decades Western Europe has had to face increasing migration levels resulting in a more diverse population. As a direct consequence, the question of adequate inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state has arisen. At the same time it has been asked whether the inclusion of non-nationals or migrants into the welfare state may undermine the solidaristic basis and legitimacy of welfare state redistribution. Citizens who are in general positive about the welfare state may adopt a critical view if migrants are granted equal access. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002/2003) for European OECD Countries we examine the relationship between ethnic diversity and public social expenditure, welfare state support and attitudes towards immigrants among European citizens. The results indicate only weak negative correlations between ethnic diversity and public social expenditure levels. Multilevel regression models with support for the welfare state and attitudes towards the legal inclusion of immigrants as dependent variables in fact reveal a negative influence of ethnic diversity. However, when controlling for migration in combination with other contextual factors, especially GDP, the unemployment rate and welfare regime seem to have a mediating influence.

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Welfare states treat different groups of needy people differently. Such differential rationing may reflect various considerations of policymakers, who act in economic, political and cultural contexts. This article aims at contributing to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the popular cultural context of welfare rationing. It examines European public perceptions of the relative deservingness of four needy groups (elderly people, sick and disabled people, unemployed people, and immigrants). Hypotheses, deduced from a literature review, are tested against data from the 1999/2000 European Values Study survey. It is found that Europeans share a common and fundamental deservingness culture: across countries and social categories there is a consistent pattern that elderly people are seen as most deserving, closely followed by sick and disabled people; unemployed people are seen as less deserving still, and immigrants as least deserving of all. Conditionality is greater in poorer countries, in countries with lower unemployment, and in countries where people have less trust in fellow citizens and in state institutions. At the national level there is no relation with welfare regime type or welfare spending. Individual differences in conditionality are determined by several socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as well as by certain features of the country people live in.

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Social policy scholars disagree about which factors best predict U.S. welfare state generosity. We argue that this disagreement is an artifact of study designs. Researchers usually study either the totality of a state?s social expenditures or one specific program. These approaches overlook the fact that individual social programs were born of different circumstances and serve different constituencies. Comparing state-level policies for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Children?s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), our findings suggest that these programs are governed by distinct logics of redistribution. Racial characteristics drive TANF generosity. Economic forces best predict CHIP generosity. SNAP generosity is a function of political factors. Qualitative data from Congressional hearings confirm these findings. These results adjudicate between conflicting accounts of the contemporary welfare state and also highlight which aspects of a program?s design make it most susceptible to the effects of racial bias and to partisan politics.

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According to numerous studies, campaign and news media messages can alter the importance individuals place on an issue when evaluating politicians, an effect called priming. Research on priming revived scholarly interest in campaign and media effects and implied, according to some, that campaigns and the media can manipulate voters. There are, however, alternative explanations for these priming findings, alternatives that previous studies have not fully considered. In this article, I reanalyze four cases of alleged priming, using panel data to test priming effects against these alternatives. Across these four cases, I find little evidence of priming effects. Instead, campaign and media attention to an issue creates the appearance of priming through a two-part process: Exposing individuals to campaign and media messages on an issue (1) informs some of them about the parties' or candidates' positions on that issue. Once informed, (2) these individuals often adopt their preferred party's or candidate's position as their own.

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This paper considers the relevance of data from a recent survey to the thesis that the welfare state is currently running the risk of a crisis of political legitimacy. Two traditions in the discussion of legitimation issues are outlined, focusing respectively on the role of ideology and of the maximization of individual values in the production of dissenting opinions about state policy. The analysis of survey data indicates that there is no evidence for the view that attitudes to welfare provision add up to a consistent disaffection with policy. Perceptions of self-interest emerge as the best predictors of preferences, and these appear closely related to location in a typical family life-style.

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This article argues that explaining institutional differentiation requires the incorporation of public preferences and understandings into accounts of state development. Using primary evidence concerning policy discussions and public opinion, it suggests that culture determined the specific features of both the British National Health Service Act of 1946 and the American Medicare Act of 1965, as well as the differences between them. Examining the interaction of institutions and culture inserts democratic standards into the top-heavy Weberian discussions of state autonomy and accounts for the seemingly inexplicable failure of policymakers to ensure cost control over the new health programs.

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This paper presents an alternative interpretation of the role played by issues and people's evaluations of the parties' positions on different issues in the electoral process. The statistical model presented and estimated in the paper departs from previous studies by hypothesizing a model in which people's issue positions, their evaluations of the parties' positions, and the strength of their party identifications are simultaneously related to each other and are thus endogenous to the electoral process. Expected votes are then determined by party evaluations. The model is estimated with data from the 1964 Election Study of the Survey Research Center. The most important influences are the effects of people's issue positions on their evaluations of the parties and the influence of these evaluations on party identifications and on voting decisions. The paper concludes by discussing the estimated model's implications for evaluations of the role of the electoral process in the determination of public policy. CR - Copyright © 1975 Midwest Political Science Association

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The sustainability of the welfare state ultimately depends on citizens’ preferences for income redistribution. They are elicited through a Discrete Choice Experiment performed in 2008 in Switzerland. Attributes are redistribution as GDP share, its uses (the unemployed, old-age pensioners, people with ill health etc.), and nationality of beneficiary. Estimated marginal willingness to pay (WTP) is positive among those who deem benefits too low, and negative otherwise. However, even those who state that government should reduce income inequality exhibit a negative WTP on average. The major finding is that estimated average WTP is maximum at 21% of GDP, clearly below the current value of 25%. Thus, the present Swiss welfare state does not appear sustainable.

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This article explores the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty. It is hypothesised that those who experience improvements in socio-economic status through social mobility are more likely to blame poverty on individual characteristics such as laziness and lack of willpower and are less likely to attribute failure to injustice in society, and on the macro-level, the effect of social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty is moderated by contextual environment. The described hypotheses are tested by using multinomial and multilevel logistic regressions and two complementary datasets—European Values Studies and the Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings suggest that social mobility is indeed associated with perceptions of individual blame and social blame of why some people are in need. However, these effects are manifested primarily among subjectively mobile individuals and are also conditioned by the legacy of socialism and the level of economic development of countries where individuals reside.

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Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about social mobility. Our randomized treatment shows pessimistic information about mobility and increases support for redistribution, mostly for "equality of opportunity" policies. We find strong political polarization. Left-wing respondents are more pessimistic about mobility: their preferences for redistribution are correlated with their mobility perceptions; and they support more redistribution after seeing pessimistic information. None of this is true for right-wing respondents, possibly because they see the government as a "problem" and not as the "solution".

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Influential economic models predict that as inequality increases, the public will demand greater redistribution. However, there is limited research into the determinants of support for redistributive tax increases because such proposals have been so rare in America in recent decades. We use Washington State?s Proposition 1098 to examine how economic self-interest, concerns about inequality, and partisanship influence support for redistributive taxation. The results show that all of these factors influenced support, with strong support among the lower income, indicating that when the distributional implications of policies are clear, citizens can translate their self-interest and broad attitudes into congruent redistributive preferences.

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We formalize and examine two overlapping models that show how rising inequality combined with ethnic and racial heterogeneity can explain why many advanced industrial countries have experienced a drop in support for redistribution as inequality has risen. One model, based on altruism and homophily, focuses on the effect of increasing “social distance” between the poor and the middle class, especially when minorities are increasingly overrepresented among the very poor. The other, based on self-interest, combines an “insurance” model of preferences for redistribution with increasingly segmented labor markets, in which immigration of workers without recognized skills leaves most native workers better off but intensifies competition for low-end jobs. Empirically, when we estimate parameters from the two models using data from multiple waves of ISSP surveys, we find that labor market segmentation, previously omitted in this literature, has more consistent effects than social distance.

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This paper uses an original dataset from a survey conducted in Switzerland in 2007 to explore the dynamics of education policy preferences. This issue has largely been neglected in that most studies on welfare state attitudes do not look at preferences for education. We argue that education policy preferences vary along two dimensions: the distribution of resources across different sectors of the education system (that is, vocational training versus academic education) and the level of investment in education both from public and private sources. With regard to the former, the findings suggest that individual educational experience matters most, that is, individuals prefer to concentrate resources on those educational sectors that are closest to their own educational background. With regard to the latter, we find that affiliation to partisan ideologies matters much more than other variables. Proponents of the left demand more investment both from the state as well as from the private sector and oppose individual tuition fees.

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Objective This article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective. Methods Individual-level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country-level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country-level effects in the error terms. Results Social mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society. Conclusions The central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.

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Immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might increase citizen support for government redistribution, but it can also generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support. These offsetting conditions obscure the net effects of immigration for welfare states. This article explores whether immigration's effects are mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants. Integration can be conceptualized and measured as involving the degree to which immigrants suffer unemployment rates, depend on welfare-state benefits, and harbor social attitudes similarly to the native population. Such integration may alter how immigration reduces solidarity and imposes fiscal and macroeconomic pressures, but does not much alter how immigration spurs economic risks for natives. Where migrants are more integrated by such measures, immigration should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution and welfare states than where migrants are less integrated. The article explores these arguments using survey data for twenty-two European countries between 2002 and 2010. The principal finding is that economic integration, more than sociocultural integration, softens the tendency of immigration to undermine support for redistributive policies.

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Popular support for American welfare policies dipped sharply during the mid-1990s. The purpose of this article is to determine why this pronounced, but temporary, shift in public opinion occurred. We use data from the CPS National Election Studies to examine several explanations for temporal variability in citizens' attitudes toward welfare spending. Our results show that these changes follow similar variations in media content. Individual-level opinion change was also based entirely upon political motivations (e.g., ideology and partisanship) rather than economic beliefs or racial attitudes. We argue that this provides evidence, admittedly somewhat indirect, that elite rhetoric guides and shapes mass opinions.

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Previous cross-national research on the link between immigration and the welfare state has focused exclusively on the relationship between the size of a country?s foreign-born population and support for redistribution, neglecting that people vary in their responses to immigration. In this article, the authors revisit the progressive?s dilemma by testing its theoretical proposition?that immigration and welfare are incompatible?in two novel ways. First, the authors conduct an individual-level analysis that demonstrates that, for most Europeans, supporting both immigration and welfare is unlikely. Second, the authors assess whether country-level immigration is associated with the salience of different immigration-welfare attitudes but find little evidence that immigration measured at the country level produces the most exclusive attitudes.

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In this article, we explore the relationship between Americans' attitudes toward immigrants and immigration and their attitudes toward welfare. Using data from the Cumulative American National Election Study from 1992 to 2012, we find ample evidence of the influence of immigration attitudes on both individuals' attitudes toward welfare recipients and their attitudes toward increased welfare spending. These immigration effects persist even in the face of statistical controls for attitudes toward African Americans and attitudes toward the poor; indeed, in our models, the magnitude of the effects of immigration attitudes surpasses the magnitude of effects of attitudes toward blacks. Further, our findings of immigration effects withstand a range of robustness tests. Our results point to the possible “immigrationalization” of Americans' welfare attitudes and provide strong evidence that how Americans think about immigration and immigrants is a major factor in how they think about welfare.

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Staffan Kumlin and Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen bring together political scientists and sociologists from different and frequently separated research communities to examine policy feedback in European welfare states. In doing so, they offer a rich menu

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This study uses comparative data from the European Social Survey to investigate the influence of self-transcendence and conservation values on public support for the welfare state. The results firstly show that these value dimensions are strongly related to welfare state support in the majority of the countries investigated. The main contribution of this study, however, is that it evidences striking differences between countries regarding which values drive welfare attitudes, and the strength of the association between values and attitudes. Moreover, we show that the between-country variation in value effects is systematically related to contextual factors. Self-transcendence values are found to be a strong predictor of welfare state support in countries with high levels of social expenditure. In the less generous welfare states of Eastern Europe, the effects of self-transcendence values are weaker or absent. In Eastern European countries, conservation rather than self-transcendence values drive attitudes to the welfare state. Outspoken cohort differences in value effects in Eastern European countries as well as persisting differences between East and West Germany confirm our interpretation that the particular Eastern European pattern can be ascribed to the unique experiences of ‘authoritarian egalitarianism' under communism.

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This article investigates whether self-interest as compared with values or ideological dispositions shapes individual attitudes towards the welfare state. Causal interpretations of how self-interest, values, and welfare state attitudes are linked have been difficult to sustain so far, as the research mainly relies on static, cross-sectional analyses. We address this empirical challenge using data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel (2008–2013) that covers the period of the international economic crisis. We investigate how individuals change their attitudes in times of economic hardship. Our findings confirm theoretical expectations that people change their support for unemployment benefits in reaction to changes in their individual material circumstances. Job loss leads to an increased support for public provision of unemployment benefits. The analysis also suggests that this attitude change is persistent. After the temporarily unemployed have found a new job, they do not return to their pre-unemployment attitude. In contrast, individual support for life course-related domains of the welfare state such as health care or pensions is not affected by changes in individual material circumstances. Our results show that individual material circumstances and thus self-interest have a sizable effect on how individuals change their welfare state attitudes.