In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it is clear that governments all over the world eventually have to take measures to mitigate the most adverse consequences of climate change. However, the costs of these measures are likely to force governments to reconsider some of their tax and spending priorities, of which social spending is the largest expenditure item in developed welfare states. Unless carried out in a way that is considered as fair by most citizens, such trade-off is likely to add a new, ecological dimension to the existing social cleavages in people’s preferences for public provision. Whether or not the possible tensions between the two sets of policies have already resulted in the emergence of a new, eco-social divide in Europe is an open question. In this paper, we hypothesise that there are four distinct attitude groups in relation to welfare and climate change policies, and that the probability of belonging to any of these groups is influenced by individuals’ socioeconomic and ideological characteristics, as well as the country context in which they live. We test our hypotheses using data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey conducted in 2016/17 in multinomial regression models. Results suggest that across Europe people are considerably divided in their support of public welfare and climate policies, but that support for both dimensions is highest in the Nordic countries. At the micro level, we find political ideology and trust in public institutions to be the most important drivers of a newly emerging eco-social divide.

New welfare has been prominent in recent European social policy debates. It involves mobilising more people into paid work, improving human capital and ensuring fairer access to opportunities. This programme is attractive to business (more workers, better human capital and reduced social conflict to enhance productivity and profitability) and to citizens (more widely accessible job-opportunities with better rewards): a relatively low-cost approach to the difficulties governments face in maintaining support and meeting social goals as inequalities widen.The general move towards 'new welfare' gathered momentum during the past two decades, given extra impetus by the 2007-9 recession and subsequent stagnation. While employment rates rose during the prosperous years before the crisis, there was no commensurate reduction in poverty. Over the same period the share of economic growth returned to labour fell, labour markets were increasingly de-regulated and inequality increased. This raises the question of whether new welfare's economic (higher employment, improved human capital) and social (better job quality and incomes) goals may come into conflict. This paper examines data for 17 European countries over the period 2001 to 2007. It shows that new welfare is much more successful at achieving higher employment than at reducing poverty, even during prosperity, and that the approach pays insufficient attention to structural factors, such as the falling wage share, and to institutional issues, such as labour market deregulation.

Trends in social protection schemes have been one of the main subjects in comparative welfare state research, not least since the financial crisis and the austerity measures that many European countries implemented in its aftermath. One of the key debates in literature is about how to measure the extent of public welfare provision as an indicator of welfare state change. Many quantitative researchers have used macro-level data on programmatic social expenditure or on the generosity of benefit rights, bringing forth major theories of welfare state retrenchment, system convergence, path dependency and paradigm changes in social policies. Recently, however, micro-level data on cash benefit receipt is seen as an alternative measure of welfare state change. Instead of gauging the cost reality of spending trends or the law reality of social rights reforms, this indicator is claimed to provide insight into changes of actual welfare receipt. This article studies benefit recipiency data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, covering 14 European countries for the period 2003 to 2013. It investigates cross-national welfare state dynamics by analysing national receipt-based benefit access rates and transfer shares and how they relate to dynamics in the prevailing indicators. Results show how much the choice of the indicator for the dependent variable affects the results of descriptive accounts of welfare state change. In addition, findings indicate what could be called welfare state reform by stealth. In several countries, levels of unemployment benefits stay significantly behind the development of median household incomes. This observation applies particularly to countries that are believed to have generous welfare systems, and it has not been revealed by research based on disaggregated social spending data or social rights data.

Global warming and some climate change policies pose additional social risks that necessitate novel responses from the welfare state. Eco-social policies have significant potential to address these challenges, but their wide-scale adoption will depend, among other factors, on public support. In the current article, we theorise how public opinion about eco-social policies is likely to be influenced by a set of contextual and individual-level factors, as well as the perceived welfare deservingness of the target groups. Alongside contributing to the emerging body of literature on eco-social policies, this theoretical framework could help policymakers to anticipate the social groups that will support or oppose eco-social policy agendas and how some of the contradictions could be reduced through policy design.

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