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

Björn Bremer, Reto Bürgisser

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)34-52
Number of pages19
JournalPolitical Science Research and Methods
Volume11
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Feb 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Comparative political economy
  • austerity
  • social investment
  • survey experiment
  • welfare state

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Public opinion on welfare state recalibration in times of austerity: Evidence from survey experiments'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this