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A study of elite opinion on the nature and future of the welfare state in six European countries, conducted during 1994, found that most of the traditional differences of opinion between left and right were still valid. Public opinion studies have consistently found strong support for state welfare. Yet during the past decade or so, governments in Europe have been pursuing policies that are largely similar in the sense that they are leading towards the containment and retrenchment of state welfare. The pressures of economic globalisation and of national structural factors have led to the replacement of the dominant social democratic expansionist model of welfare with the neo-liberal contractionist model. The result is that in the same way that governments of the right pursued expansionist policies of welfare during the reign of the social democratic model in the 1960s and early 1970s, governments of the left have in the past few years pursued policies of containment and contraction and they are likely to continue do to so in the foreseeable future.

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