Contested Welfare States

Welfare Attitudes in Europe and Beyond

Stefan Svallfors

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780804782524
• eBook ISBN: 9780804783170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

The welfare state is a trademark of the European social model. An extensive set of social and institutional actors provides protection against common risks, offering economic support in periods of hardship and ensuring access to care and services. Welfare policies define a set of social rights and address common vulnerabilities to protect citizens from market uncertainties. But over recent decades, European welfare states have undergone profound restructuring and recalibration.

This book analyzes people's attitudes toward welfare policies across Europe, and offers a novel comparison with the United States. Occupied with normative orientations toward the redistribution of resources and public policies aimed at ameliorating adverse conditions, the book focuses on the interplay between individual welfare attitudes and behavior, institutional contexts, and structural variables. It provides essential input into the comparative study of welfare state attitudes and offers critical insights into the public legitimacy of welfare state reform.

CHAPTER ONE

Welfare States and Welfare Attitudes

Stefan Svallfors

The welfare state may in many ways be seen as a particular trademark of the European social model. An extensive set of social and institutional actors provide protection against negative consequences of common life-course risks—for example, by offering economic support in periods of hardship or by ensuring access to care and services. Based on collective responsibility and financing, welfare policies define a set of social rights, meet common vulnerabilities, and address needs for protection from market uncertainties.

However, over recent decades, European welfare states have undergone profound restructuring and recalibration. This is a result of economic and political pressures and of adaptive processes to new contingencies due to demographic changes, international migration and economic competition, and persistent unemployment. New forms of risk, taking different shapes across welfare states, have grown out of precarious and insecure life courses. Rising concerns about welfare state sustainability and the slowly growing “Europeanization” of welfare policies are also common challenges across the continent. Increased provider pluralism and new forms of public management, as well as new forms of policies and state intervention, in particular regarding activation policies, work–family reconciliation, and gender policies, are attempts to adjust to these challenges.

In parallel with institutional and structural developments, collective beliefs and representations about welfare and justice have also evolved, sometimes reflecting exclusion and perceived lack of deservingness of groups of beneficiaries—in particular, members of minority groups. In all of these challenges and processes of change, the attitudes and orientations of the public are important, although often neglected, factors that must be taken into account. Established viewpoints, normative expectations, concepts of justice, and similar perceptions are often very hard to change, and in this way, attitudes often function as a counterweight to abrupt policy changes. Policy reformers need to deal with normative orientations and expectations that have been established by previous politics and policies, and this often hinders or derails policy changes. Conversely, existing attitudes may be a resource and part of the opportunity structure for actors bent on challenging the institutionalized status quo and effectuating political change.

Attitudes toward the welfare state and other public institutions should be seen as central components of social order, governance, and legitimacy of modern societies. They tell us something about whether or not existing social arrangements are legitimate. Are they accepted only because people see no alternatives or think that action is futile, or are they normatively grounded? Are institutions considered to be fundamentally just or not? And research into the antecedents and consequences of these attitudes also asks us to judge public policies not only by their distributive effects or by their economic efficiency but by their normative effects on mass publics.

In this book, we analyze and report results from a comprehensive research program on citizens’ attitudes toward welfare policies across European countries. We also offer a novel comparison with the case of the United States, putting into further perspective the potential regional distinctiveness of the European context as a whole. We are mainly occupied with normative orientations toward the (re)distribution of resources and life chances and toward public policies aimed at ameliorating adverse conditions. We summarize these under the heading “welfare attitudes.” Our research focuses on the interplay among individual welfare attitudes and behaviors, institutional contexts, and structural variables. We hope to provide essential input to the interdisciplinary field of comparative studies of welfare state attitudes and to offer critical insights into the public legitimacy of welfare state reform.

Along with the societal and political context, the dominant welfare state theories also have changed considerably over time. The 1970s and 1980s saw a plethora of treatises on “welfare state crisis” (O’Connor, 1974; Offe, 1984), “legitimation crisis” (Habermas, 1975), and “government overload” (Crozier et al., 1975). All of these arguments suggested that a highly problematic relationship existed between the workings of government and the legitimacy of the state. Either citizens asked for too much government, in a vicious spiral of insatiable demands, or for less government, as expressed in increasing alienation from government and its bureaucratic intrusions into everyday life. As discussed in the next section, many of these arguments seem—with the benefit of hindsight—widely overblown.

Following the publication of the landmark study “Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism” (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and other publications from the “power resource” school of welfare state research (for example, Korpi, 1989; Huber and Stephens, 2001a; Korpi and Palme, 2003), the 1990s and early 2000s were much dominated by the debate on welfare regimes. What were the antecedents and effects of different institutional configurations of the welfare state (Korpi and Palme, 1998)? Did welfare states in fact come in “worlds” or “families of nations” (Castles and Mitchell, 1992; Castles, 1993; Scruggs and Allan, 2006; 2008)?

Here a much more harmonious relationship between welfare states and the attitudes among their citizens transpired. As suggested by the political labeling of Esping-Andersen’s three welfare regimes (liberal, conservative, and social democratic), welfare regimes were seen as rooted in distinct political values and ideologies. Furthermore, existing welfare regimes tended to mold welfare attitudes among their citizens in distinctive ways, making for some degree of congruence between welfare state institutions and opinions among mass publics (Svallfors, 1997; 2003).

In the last few years, concerns have been raised that the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of Europe constitutes a threat against welfare state legitimacy (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Banting and Kymlicka, 2006; Boeri et al., 2002). National welfare states were predicated on maintaining clear borders between the population that should be covered by welfare state protection (and asked to finance it) and those who were outsiders. With increasing international migration, both within Europe and from elsewhere, borders have become much more permeable, and the distinction between those who “belong” and those who do not is now less clear-cut. The ethnic fragmentation of the United States and its impediments for the establishment of a universal welfare state have been held up as the new problematic future for European welfare states (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004).

In this volume, we pick up elements from all three strands of research, but we apply them within our comparative framework, focusing on welfare attitudes as key lynchpins of institutional legitimacy. We conduct our analyses in a context of “permanent austerity” (Pierson, 2001), in which the demographic situation of European countries particularly makes welfare state sustainability a problematic issue. Even if the “crisis and overload” literature was not written in the same climate, many of the themes about demands on and evaluations of welfare policies are relevant also today.

Furthermore, we rely to some extent on the literature about welfare regimes for framing our own inquiries. But we are less concerned with comparing levels or group patterns of attitudes across regimes—as argued below, these are exercises with diminishing returns—than on testing to what extent associations and processes play out differently in different welfare regimes. To some extent, we are also involved in transcending the regime framework into more general tests of the influence and interactions of different macro features of the countries we compare.

Finally, a novelty of the book concerns the analysis of the relationship between diversity and welfare attitudes. By investigating the effects of new forms of diversity among both target populations and the populations at large, it touches on the social consequences of various forms of migratory flows in European societies.

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE ART

A substantial number of previous studies have analyzed how institutional and cultural factors impinge on the formation of attitudes toward the welfare state in different contexts (for a selection of recent book-length examples, see Cook and Barrett, 1992; Roller, 1992; Jenssen and Martinussen, 1994; Borre and Scarbrough, 1995; Svallfors, 1996; Gilens, 1999; Svallfors and Taylor-Gooby, 1999; Andress et al., 2001; Arriba et al., 2006; Larsen, 2006; Brooks and Manza, 2007; Svallfors, 2007). From the 1990s onward, a growing number of such studies have used a cross-national and comparative approach (see, for example, Svallfors, 1997; 2003; 2007; Bonoli, 2000; Van Oorschot and Halman, 2000; Andress and Heien, 2001; Mau, 2003; Jæger, 2006; Larsen, 2006; Van Oorschot, 2006; Brooks and Manza, 2007; Larsen, 2008).

In order to place these contributions, and the ones from this book, in context and perspective, the history of analyses of welfare attitudes needs to be recapitulated. This field was for a long time marred by a lack of data. While reasonably good data had been available for some time when it came to issues such as social mobility, income distribution, and economic indicators of all sorts, that was not the case (even by the late 1980s) when it came to comparing attitudes across countries. This situation is now completely changed with the establishment and growth of data production collaborations such as the European Social Survey, the International Social Survey Program, and the World Values Survey. The field is now “data-rich,” but advanced analyses, explanations, and interpretations lag behind. We hope to make a substantial contribution in this respect through this book.

Although election studies and other general surveys had occasionally investigated welfare attitudes from the 1950s onward, more extensive and systematic research did not take hold until the 1970s. It took both the maturation of extensive welfare states and their political questioning in the wake of the economic problems of the 1970s to make public opinion about the welfare state a salient research issue. This first generation of scholars in the field had to make do with compiling, reanalyzing, and comparing national surveys on welfare attitudes—something that made conclusions fragile.

One of the earliest attempts to compile and reanalyze existing surveys was made by Richard Coughlin (1979; 1980). Coughlin compared attitude data from eight rich countries using existing national surveys. Another influential series of reanalyses of existing survey data were carried out by Peter Taylor-Gooby (1982; 1983; 1985), who used British surveys to describe patterns and pinpoint ambivalences in welfare attitudes.

These first attempts at probing the patterns of welfare attitudes were soon followed by a wave of national surveys, in which different aspects of attitudes toward welfare were investigated. In the 1980s, national surveys were conducted and analyzed in a host of advanced capitalist countries, including the United States (Cook and Barrett, 1992), Germany (Roller, 1992), Sweden (Svallfors, 1989), and Britain (Saunders, 1990).

Although conclusions emanated from different data sets and various comparisons, and differed in substance and emphasis, a set of common key findings from these early works may be summarized in five short points:

1. Overall, attitudes were strongly supportive of an encompassing welfare state. In contrast to sweeping statements in the public debate about generational processes leading younger generations away from support for welfare policies or about rising resistance against bureaucratic-administrative intrusions, the early research in general showed the welfare state to be quite popular. Encompassing welfare policies, which are collectively financed and publicly organized, proved to have overall support from the citizens of the advanced capitalist economies.

2. At the same time, a clear difference in support for universal and selective programs was found. Universal encompassing programs such as pensions and health care received strong support, while more targeted or selective programs such as unemployment benefits and social assistance received much lower support. This pattern essentially applied in most, if not all, advanced capitalist democracies.

3. A clear difference was also documented between general and specific support for the welfare state. General support, in the form of attitudes toward objects such as “the public sector” or “social reforms,” proved to be more dependent on changes in the public discourse and general ideological dispositions, and public support was therefore more volatile at this level. Specific support for concrete welfare policy programs, on the other hand, was shown to be more stable because it was rooted in everyday life experiences.

4. The clear support for welfare policies coexisted with considerable ambivalence regarding several aspects of welfare policies. Quite widespread suspicions about welfare abuse and cheating, for example, and concerns about bureaucracy and inefficiencies in the public sector were important qualifications of the overall support for the redistributive and risk-reducing aspects of welfare policies.

5. The early research also confirmed that class and “class-related” factors (such as income and education) were the most important determinants behind welfare attitudes—in contrast to widespread arguments about sector-related cleavages as the new main factors behind welfare attitudes (Dunleavy, 1980; Saunders, 1986: Ch. 8).

Although these first-generation analyses were severely restrained by the nonexistence of truly comparative data, they formed an important backdrop to later developments in the field. Simply by making welfare attitudes a topic for systematic social scientific research, instead of the object of political and speculative projections, they laid the ground for subsequent extensions and improvements. Important single-country studies continued to flourish over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, often focusing on change in welfare attitudes over time—and often finding very little change. (For a selection of analyses based on single-country surveys, see Jenssen and Martinussen, 1994; Svallfors, 1996; Van Oorschot, 1998; Blomberg-Kroll, 1999; the individual chapters in Svallfors and Taylor-Gooby, 1999; Andress et al., 2001; Arriba et al., 2006; Staerklé et al., 2007.)

But crucially, from the 1990s onward, research on welfare attitudes also took an explicitly comparative turn. The precondition of this was the establishment, consolidation, and increasing sophistication of comparative data sets. Data collected (in order of appearance) through the Eurobarometer, the European (later World) Values Surveys, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Editors
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• CHAPTER ONE: Welfare States and Welfare Attitudes
• CHAPTER TWO: Welfare Performance and Welfare Support
• CHAPTER THREE: Attitudes Among High-Risk Groups
• CHAPTER FOUR: A Normative Approach to Welfare Attitudes
• CHAPTER FIVE: Unraveling Working-Class Welfare Chauvinism
• CHAPTER SIX: Age, Class, and Attitudes Toward Government Responsibilities
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Framing Theory, Welfare Attitudes, and the United States Case
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Welfare Attitudes in Context
• Index