Who Wants Demanding Active Labour Market Policies? Public Attitudes towards Policies that put Pressure on the Unemployed

Abstract

The literature addressing attitudes about social policy and the welfare state has been telling us for decades that welfare interventions are supported by those individuals who benefit from a specific measure. The diffusion of 'demanding' active labour market policies (ALMPs), however, challenges this relationship. Using a novel dataset, I analyse which individual-and countrylevel factors explain public support for demanding ALMPs in five Western European countries. The results show that labour market risk and ideological orientation influence public attitudes towards these ALMPs. Thereby, unemployed individuals sympathising with the political right are more strongly opposed to demanding measures than employed individuals with the same political preferences. Moreover, aggregate support is found to be correlated with the country's ALMP legacy, varying from high levels in Germany and the UK to low levels in Denmark and France. The findings suggest that most ALMPs are in fact implemented despite the opposition of their beneficiaries.

Jobs at risk? Task routineness, offshorability, and attitudes toward immigration

“…In the same vein, economically vulnerable workers may also favor social policies, which mitigate the negative effects of economic change. They may thus support more income redistributionand less workfare (Rehm, 2009;Fossati, 2018;Thewissen and Rueda, 2019).…”

Public opinion towards workfare policies in Europe: Polarisation of attitudes in times of austerity?

“…Workfare policies impose additional burdens on the unemployed and lead to a restraint of their benefits if they decline a job offer. The employed, in contrast, can expect a reduction in their tax burden if strong activation policies lead to a lower unemployment rate and thus reduce the costs for the social system (Fossati, ). Thus, unemployed individuals can be expected to oppose political measures that put additional pressure on them, in turn decreasing their support for workfare policies.…”

“…First, it has extended the usual focus on social benefit rights by investigating attitudes towards the social legitimacy of benefit obligations. While there is extensive literature on the individual determinants of attitudes towards the rights of the unemployed (Fraile & Ferrer, ), only a few recent studies have focused on unemployed persons’ responsibilities (Fossati, ; Roosma & Jeene, ). Second, the study moved beyond a static cross‐sectional analysis and has provided a comparative study of how attitudinal cleavages concerning workfare policies have changed over a period of two decades.…”

Going beyond values versus self-interest: whose attitudes change after employment transitions?

“…In cases of 'demanding' active LMP measures that e.g. implement sanctions against unsatisfactory efforts for job search one might even expect less support by labour market outsiders, as argued and shown by Fossati (2018). Such demanding active LMPs are, however, neither theoretically nor empirically the focus of the present article.…”