Literature on welfare attitudes has reached a stylized scheme in which egalitarian values and self-interest concerns are the two main determinants of welfare attitudes. We aim to bring forward existing research by identifying additional values that people draw on to elaborate opinions on welfare issues. Using data from the European Social Survey 2008 and 26 countries, we find that values such as multiculturalism or authoritarianism, among others, lie at the roots of welfare attitudes. However, egalitarianism is the only value with a significant effect in all countries. Differences between welfare regimes in the values associated with welfare opinions exist but are unconnected with aggregate support for the welfare state, suggesting that this institution can achieve a high level of legitimacy on different moral grounds.

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Perceived efficacy of welfare services has never been studied among the variables that determine attitudes toward welfare state reform. Are citizens more prone to accept social expenditure cuts, tax cuts or privatization reforms in welfare programmes when they perceive those programmes as ineffective? With the aim of answering this question, the Spanish case is explored using a 2005 survey carried out by the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research (CIS) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The article analyses citizen attitudes toward four welfare policy areas: health, education, pensions and unemployment protection, and toward the reforms that could be made in them. The results question the usual contention of politicians and practitioners who often suggest that citizens who perceive public services as ineffective would prefer lower public expenditure and taxes to purchase some welfare services in a more effective private sector. Points for practitioners The findings of the article have implications for decision-makers committed to public service reforms. Our results contradict the contention that in recent years western citizens' attitudes in support of a powerful welfare state are less enthusiastic than they were in the past. At least in some countries, it can be said that the poor performance of welfare programmes perceived by citizens does not necessarily lead them to espouse privatization. Most citizens think that the inefficacy of welfare services is due to their lack of resources and they seem to be inclined to support the improvement and increase of investment in the public services instead of other existing alternatives. Public managers may utilize these findings as a basis for demanding additional resources, but this strategy should not lead them to neglect their striving for more efficient provision of services, since citizens' attitudes may change if inefficacy is prolonged.

Exploring the relations between different migrants who meet in Spain, this article discusses issues of mobility, the globalization of care and service work, and precarization of labor and livelihoods, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work and retirement conditions in Europe. A mélange of migratory processes are scrutinized along a Swedish-Spanish North-South axis. It analyzes longstanding conditions on the Spanish labor market combined with neoliberal de- and reregulation of work and welfare with a bearing on spatial and social inequalities across the European Union. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of the workers and entrepreneurs who provide care and services for them. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to organization of migration as well as work and services. Some of these workers, especially third country migrants, occupy precarious, and sometimes informalized, low skilled jobs in an ethnically segmented and gendered labor market.

This article seeks to assess the extent to which international retirement migrants (IRMs) living in Spain make use of public elder-care services, as well as how public officials deal with their demands. The data stems from qualitative interviews with 19 social workers in ten communities characterised by a sizable population of retirement migrants. We found that substantial numbers of retirement migrants remain in Spain well after dependency sets in. This necessitates the development of complex strategies to obtain care by means of social networks, voluntary associations, and private care providers. A certain reluctance to engage with Spanish social services may explain the fact that these services are accessed only as a last resort when all other options have failed. However, the entire process of evaluating the needs of, and granting public care services to, retirement migrants is plagued by difficulties. Social workers cite the lack of a common language as a significant obstacle, together with insufficient information on claimants’ health, economic and family situations (many IRMs are not registered as residents in Spain). The familistic rules governing Spanish social services and the recent reductions in public budgets due to the economic crisis constitute additional barriers to the adequate protection of IRMs.