Public opinion on welfare state recalibration in times of austerity: evidence from survey experiments

Abstract

Even though social investment is highly popular, welfare state recalibration remains an uphill battle. When resources are scarce in times of austerity, welfare recalibration involves multidimensional trade-offs. Existing research primarily studied preferences toward individual policies or trade-offs in specific policy fields, failing to capture citizens’ overall social policy priorities. Using two novel survey experiments in three European countries, we show that citizens have clear social policy priorities: pensions and education enjoy a high, family policies a medium, and labor market policies a low priority. However, policy constituencies differ in their relative priorities. Our findings suggest that welfare state recalibration is difficult because trade-offs are unpopular, and distributive conflicts in mature welfare states are mainly about distributing resources to specific social groups.

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

“…2020). 9 Bremer and Bürgisser (2020), who also study the relative importance of social policies find the same ‘priority order’, which is largely consistent with the findings of the literature on welfare deservingness (van Oorschot 2006). These studies are not concerned with the divide between investment and consumption, but they use similar types of data.…”

“…All three mechanisms – self‐interest, values and trust – might explain different levels of SI support among working‐ and middle‐class voters, that is, differences in actual policy positions . However, while some empirical studies indeed find slightly higher levels of SI demand among middle‐class voters, the overall finding is again one of very high generalised levels of policy support across different social groups (Bremer & Bürgisser 2020; Garritzmann, et al. 2018a).…”

“…By contrast, when it comes to SI, costs occur in the immediate, but returns are both temporally distant and more uncertain in distributive terms. Hence, since investment and consumption reflect different logics of how social policy sustains security and inclusion, conflict over SI is structured – both at the level of voters and at the level of political parties – in ways that differ from conflict over social consumption (Abou‐Chadi & Immergut, 2019; Bremer & Bürgisser 2020; Garritzmann, et al. 2018a; Häusermann & Kriesi 2015).…”

“…By contrast, we examine in this study whether working‐ and middle‐class voters differ in the importance they attribute to SI. Theoretically, it makes sense to expect that people do hold actual preferences over policy importance: not only are perceptions of fiscal constraints on policy choices extremely widespread in the population (Barnes & Hicks 2018; Bremer & Bürgisser 2020), distributive outcomes of policies are also different across respondents, in particular when it comes to SI policies (Bonoli & Liechti 2018; Pavolini & Van Lancker 2018). In a context of (perceived) fiscal constraint, these differential benefits become rivals, and thus we would expect priorities to diverge.…”

“…Hardly any research to date has studied either these priorities, their determinants or their implications, and this is no surprise, as we largely lacked both theory and adequate data until very recently (as contributions starting to address this idea, see for example Bremer & Bürgisser 2020; Enggist & Pinggera 2021; Gallego & Marx 2017; Häusermann et al. 2019; Pinggera 2020).…”