Political legitimacy and welfare state futures: Introduction

Abstract

Welfare attitudes are pivotal in understanding the preferences and demands of citizens to help shape future policy reforms in welfare states. Accordingly, and due to the availability of large scale comparative survey data on attitudes, large numbers of studies of welfare attitudes have emerged during the past few decades. However, some limitations still exist in the field, such as the background assumptions informing the questionnaire design and top-down framing of issues, the population represented, and, lastly, limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings together articles that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to provide some guidance for future studies. This article first summarizes the existing studies on welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes.

Tax Constraints, Social Policy Preferences, and Support for Redistribution

“…Also, adding a tax constraint raises awareness that someone has to pay for the additional spending, but it remains open to the respondents' interpretation of who should pay [23]. Conjoint analysis and vignettes [33], but also more qualitative methods, are promising methodological techniques to complement the standard survey research in this field [34,35]. Second, our findings, together with previous studies on tax constraints, have implications for policy making.…”

Запросы Россиян На Содействие Государства: Социальное Инвестирование Или Социальная Поддержка?

“…Оно диктуется, в первую очередь, (1) собственными интересами населения [Blekesaune, Quadagno, 2003;Knijn, van Oorschot, 2008] и (2) идеологическими паттернами [Blekesaune, 2013;Edlund, 2006;Hasenfeld, RaVerty, 1989;Groskind, 1994, Jaeger, 2006, которые в зависимости от позиций исследователей также могут дополняться спецификой социализации, паттернами национальной культуры в отношении социальной поли тики, текущей конфигурацией социальной сферы и т. д. [Blekesaune, 2013;Chung, Meuleman, 2017;Chung et al, 2018;Kootstra, Roosma, 2018 и др.]. Значимость индивидуальных интересов в вопросе восприятия политики все общего благосостояния и отдельных ее механизмов многократно подтверж дена эмпирическими исследованиями.…”

The contribution of deliberative forums to studying welfare state attitudes: A United Kingdom study

“…These surveys are valued cross‐national sources for comparative data on welfare attitudes, and have received considerable scholarly attention, leading to more than 1,500 publications in the past two decades (Sundberg & Taylor‐Gooby, ). We do not go into great detail outlining the findings of specific studies, but for more information and a summary see the introduction to this regional issue (Chung, Taylor‐Gooby, & Leruth, ). What we are interested in this article is the choice of topics examined in welfare attitudes research, as well as how it is framed.…”

“…In conventional welfare state attitudes research (e.g., Blekesaune & Quadagno, ; Chung & Meuleman, ; Goerres & Tepe, ; Knijn & Van Oorschot, ; Taylor‐Gooby, ; Van Oorschot & Meuleman, ), welfare attitude preferences are understood to depend on self‐interest, ideological beliefs, opportunity structures at both the individual level and the national level and the institutional framework in which they live (for more detail, see the introduction to this issue, Chung et al, ). These results are usually derived from analysis of the covariate structures of variables measuring the various explanatory factors along with the dependent variable which it is intended to explain: support for a certain policy, and or preferences towards redistribution.…”