We urgently need to understand what people want for the future of the welfare state for two reasons. Firstly, European welfare states face severe challenges and are changing rapidly. Change is driven by long-run factors that include population ageing , globalization , labour market change , rising inequality , unprecedented levels of immigration in most European countries, constrained resources and a decline in the forces that traditionally supported public provision. We need to know what people expect from the welfare state and what reforms they will support.
Secondly, these challenges are exacerbated by immediate economic factorsāthe Great Recession , stagnation and more intense budgetary pressureāand by a new, global wave of radical populist politics, which mistrusts elites and experts and demands greater control over government . We need to know what the implications of these changes are for public attitudes and for welfare state futures.
This book analyses welfare state attitudes and priorities and the way people justify them. It uses a new method, Democratic Forums . This method does not pre-categorise public opinion in the way that conventional quantitative surveys do, but seeks to give āordinaryā people as much control as possible over the way attitudes are studiedāas it were, a populism in social science research.
This chapter falls into five sections that consider, respectively, the following dimensions: current challenges to European welfare states; responses to these challenges and the importance of attitude studies ; review of the existing literature on welfare state attitudes (almost entirely from pre-coded surveys); explanation of our new method, Democratic Forums ; discussion of the contribution that our research makes to understanding current challenges; and lastly, we draw conclusions about the key themes in popular understanding of welfare state futures in different European countries.
Challenges to the Welfare State in Europe: Population Ageing, Austerity and the New Populism
The challenges confronting European welfare states have been discussed in an extensive literature (Ervasti et al. 2012; Pierson 2001; Van Kersbergen and Vis 2014) and in our companion book After Austerity (Taylor-Gooby et al. 2017). They may be divided into two groups: structural threats caused by continuing changes in the context of state welfare, and political challenges that result from the policies pursued by national governments in response. Into the first group fall population ageing with its attendant pressures on pension , health - and social - care spending , and the labour force; economic globalization which challenges the capacity of governments to maintain national employment policies; the inequality resulting from changes in the world of work and labour market dualisation ; the competitiveness imperative that more open markets impose on national industries; and the high levels of immigration resulting largely from war and disorder, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa . The second group includes public spending cutbacks and the exacerbation of inequality as governments prioritise balanced budgets over state interventions at the national and European Central Bank (ECB) level ; and a new wave of populist politics, especially on the right, that often promotes isolationism and foregrounds a welfare chauvinism that ring-fences public provision for nationals.
A series of reforms have contained pressures to escalate health and pensions spending across Europe (see Taylor-Gooby et al. 2017, Chaps. 1 and 10). Most governments have addressed labour-force issues by cutting back benefits and introducing stricter entitlement rules to promote flexibility and enhance work incentives , by investing in education and training to improve skills and productivity and by seeking to mobilise older people and those with young children into paid work, for example raising the pension age and subsidising childcare (Hemerijk 2013, Chap. 1). These policies are intended to enhance national competitiveness in a more globalized world and help address inequality and poverty.
Flexibility, Work First,1 financial stringency and social investment have had varying success in different parts of Europe. The EUās Europe 2020 programme seeks to draw national initiatives together to address a range of issues including climate change and energy production as well as productivity and inequality . It reports positive developments in education since 2008 , particularly among women who also have higher levels of employment and a slow growth in their proportion of the working population, but no progress in the proportion of men in paid work, or progress in reducing poverty or inequality (Eurostat 2017a). More detailed analysis shows that success tends to be concentrated in Northern and Western Europe, while the most serious problems are found in Southern Europe and the post-socialist countries (Eurostat 2017b). Liberal Europe (notably the UK) does relatively well in employment but has failed to address poverty .
The majority of European governments and the EU as a whole have pursued ābalanced budgetā programmes, requiring very substantial cuts in public spending , especially in those countries receiving bailout loans from the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU āGreece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland (De la Porte and Heins 2015). Greece and Franceās attempts to pursue neo-Keynesian state-led investment and social spending programmes in 2012ā2016 achieved very little (see for example Petmesidou 2017; Leruth 2017).
The sense of economic and social malaise and the failure of governments to address the very real problems many people experience have contributed to the populist shift notably on the right in national politics across Europe, typically combining suspicion of established elites and of institutions such as the EU with programmes to end or reduce immigration , welfare chauvinism and higher spending on services for nationals.
Eurosceptic parties across Europe have considerably increased their influence since the advent of the Great Recession . Such parties have joined the government in Finland, Hungary and Poland and gained substantial numbers of votes elsewhere, but the UK is the only country to trigger the EU exit process , following a referendum on 23 June 2016. This has stimulated a process of ādifferentiated disintegration ā in the European Union (Leruth 2017; Leruth et al. 2018). The debate surrounding Greeceās possible exit from the Economic and Monetary Union, which started in 2013, still continues as the country encounters severe difficulties in repaying EU-led bailouts. Following the results of nationa...