Although attitudes toward homosexuality have become more liberal, particularly in industrialized Western countries, there is still a great deal of variance in terms of worldwide levels of homonegativity. Using data from the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey (1999-2004, 2005-2009), this article seeks to explain this variance by means of a multilevel analysis of 79 countries. We include characteristics on the individual level, as age or gender, as well as aggregate variables linked to specificities of the nation-states. In particular, we focus on the religious denomination of a person and her religiosity to explain her attitude toward homosexuality. We find clear differences in levels of homonegativity among the followers of the individual religions.

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Recent findings about the electoral cost of welfare state retrenchment challenge the view of the ‘New Politics’ literature that cutting welfare state entitlements is electorally risky. In fact, there seems to be no systematic punishment for governments retrenching the welfare state. At the same time, however, studies show that governments use numerous blame avoidance strategies when cutting welfare. Reflecting on this apparent contradiction we put forward two points. First, qualitative evidence from interviews with political leaders suggests that it is not the actual risk of being punished that entices politicians to use blame avoidance but the perception of this risk. This explains why blame avoidance strategies are widely used. Second, the existing studies showing that governments are not systematically punished for cutting the welfare state suffer from the lack of control for blame avoidance effects. We show that an experimental design could be a remedy for this problem.

A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called 'invisible' policy instruments, e.g. a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by implication, mainly happen using 'visible' policy instruments, e.g. a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1,030 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland, and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition.

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