This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective‐restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio‐political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.

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.