Public Support for Sustainable Welfare Compared: Links between Attitudes towards Climate and Welfare Policies

Abstract

The emerging concept of sustainable welfare attempts to integrate environmental sustainability and social welfare research. Oriented at a mid-term re-embedding of Western production and consumption norms into planetary limits, it suggests the development of “eco-social” policies in the rich countries. In this theoretical context, this article empirically investigates the relationships between attitudes towards welfare and climate policy in 23 countries. Using 2016 data from the European Social Survey, we explored patterns of synergy between both kinds of policies as well as effects of crowding-out, where support for one kind of policy involves refusing the other. Since previous research addressed the role of welfare states and their institutional foundations in establishing environmentally sustainable societies, we studied how attitudes towards welfare and climate policies differ according to welfare regime affiliation. Additionally, we examined how a range of socio-demographic and political factors such as class, education, income, and political position shape people’s views on welfare and climate policy goals. The results of a multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the simultaneous support of welfare and climate policies follows welfare regime lines in that this support is the highest among social-democratic countries. However, also some conservative and Mediterranean countries score high in this regard. At the individual level, people with a higher education, employees in socio-cultural professions, and voters of moderate left and green parties display the highest mutual support for welfare and climate policies.

Eco-Social Divides in Europe: Public Attitudes towards Welfare and Climate Change Policies

“…Overall, if we take relative equality of sizes of the four groups as a sign of deeper polarisation, the countries with people most divided over the eco-social priorities were Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovenia. While supporting the findings of earlier research by Fritz and Koch [13] regarding the Nordic countries, our results deviate from theirs namely in that we do not find "eco-social enthusiasts" to be very frequent in corporatist welfare states like Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We expect this to be the result of our different approaches in terms of the operationalisation of support of welfare and climate policies, and the method of analysis.…”

“…Theoretically, we hypothesised four eco-social attitudinal groups defined by their stance towards public welfare and climate policies, and that individual-level and contextual factors influence Europeans' propensity of belonging to one of these groups. This approach differs from the one taken by Fritz and Koch [13] who modelled different dimensions of welfare and climate policy attitudes on the basis of the ESS8 data. Empirically, we used data from a novel ESS rotating-module on climate change attitudes together with data from the existing rotating module on welfare attitudes to explore the intersection between these two fields at the individual, rather than country level.…”

“…To add to uncertainty, a comparative study by Jakobsson and colleagues [12] found that in some European countries the relation between support for income redistribution and willingness to pay for environmental protection was positive, while in others it was negative, and still in others-non-existent. Only in more-recent research, Fritz and Koch [13] overcame this two-dimensional approach. Using multiple correspondence analysis of ESS data, the authors found that there were three main patterns of the relationship between welfare and climate policies.…”

Money, Vouchers, Public Infrastructures? A Framework for Sustainable Welfare Benefits

“…The Welfare Benefit (Income, Voucher, Infrastructure) (8) is given to (a) everyone in the jurisdiction (b) a specific target group (means-tested or privilege(d) (c) applicants (d) legal entities (e.g., companies) (9) can (a) not be transferred (b) be transferred to selected people (e.g., family members) (c) be donated to institutions (d) be freely traded (10) is issued/paid for by (a) international organizations/the state/counties/municipalities (b) public institutions (e.g., health insurances) (c) NGOs and self-governed institutions (d) private companies (11) is accepted and the good/service provided within a certain geographical area of validity (a) accepted by public institutions e.g., municipalities (b) accepted by public sectors (e.g., public hospitals) (c) accepted by non-profit sector (d) accepted by private sector e) accepted by other individuals (12) is of (a) explicit character (i.e., paper, electronically) (b) implicit character (i.e., recipients themselves become the "vouchers" that are allocated to certain institutions e.g., school enrolment [15]) (c) neither (13) (a) enables exclusive access to the good, which means the good cannot be acquired by other means (b) can only be used up to a maximum consumption when recipients are subject to the welfare programme. If they want to consume more they have to opt-out of the welfare programme (c) an advantaged (e.g., discount) access to the good that can otherwise be bought for regular prices on the market (14) relates to the prior situations as (a) introducing a new good (b) providing an existing goods in a new way (e.g., instead of in-cash or in-kind benefits) (c) replacing a market distribution of the good (d) being part of a larger policy change e.g., establishing a compensation for a tax raise.…”

“…On a conceptual level, both social and environmental policies reduce the externalization of social costs and overexploitation of human and ecological resources [8]. Welfare states shape societal provisioning systems and welfare regimes are said to differ in their ability to incorporate environmental goals [9,10]. Indeed different clusters of eco-social states have been identified, although a systematic relationship has not yet been found with welfare state regime types [11,12].…”