Reducing economic inequality and combatting climate change are two strongly supported policy goals, but they will require significant public investments. In times of limited fiscal resources, governments struggle to raise additional revenues needed to finance both, making trade-offs between generally supported policy goals likely. But how do citizens decide if they have to choose between goals they support in principle, such as spending on efforts to reduce inequality and channeling resources toward initiatives to protect the environment? We discuss three major factors that help explain this choiceinformation, self-interest, and ideological orientation. Our experimental study shows that information is not a significant determinant of such choices, and that ideology is only important as long as there are no conflicting goals. Once citizens have to decide between redistribution and environmental protection, myopic self-interest trumps all other theoretically relevant variables mentioned in the literature.

The COVID-19 crisis presents a unique opportunity to study how public opinion towards the redistributive role of the state reacts to a major economic shock. The pandemic and the measures taken to stop it exposed citizens to both increased fiscal constraint and heightened redistributive capacity: historical drops in GDP (and fiscal revenue) coincided with unprecedented increases in public spending on healthcare provisions and social policy, as well as staggering amounts of financial liquidity provided to hard-hit economic sectors. How did this affect citizens' attitudes towards redistribution and their assessments of the capacity of the state to intervene? To tackle these questions, we rely on a two-wave panel survey fielded in Germany, Sweden and Spain in late 2018 and June 2020. While preferred levels of redistribution have remained largely stable, our results indicate major shifts and growing ideological polarization around perceptions of welfare state efficiency and capacity, fiscal constraint and political trust. Hence, the COVID-crisis has so far neither led to a left-nor a right-wing shift in citizens' desired level of state intervention, but to an increasingly polarized context of (re)distributive politics, which is likely to imply heightened conflict over economic and social policy in the future.

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.

Postindustrialization and occupational change considerably complicate partisan politics of the welfare state. This article asks about the determinants of contemporary social democratic labor market policy. We argue that the composition of their support base is a critical constraint and empirically demonstrate that the actual electoral clout of different voter segments decisively affects policy outcomes under left government. We calculate the electoral relevance of two crucial subgroups of the social democratic coalition, labor market insiders and outsiders, in 19 European democracies and combine these indicators with original data capturing the specific content of labor market reforms. The analysis reveals considerable levels of responsiveness and demonstrates that relative electoral relevance is consistently related to policy outcomes. Social democratic governments with a stronger support base among the atypically employed push labor market reforms on their behalf—and vice versa. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of policy-making in postindustrial societies.

In the wake of the European sovereign debt crisis, governments across the continent pursued fiscal consolidation. Existing research claims that fiscally conservative citizens support such fiscal policies. However, this literature largely ignores that fiscal consolidation carries substantial trade-offs. In hard times, governments have to cut spending or raise taxes to reduce government debt. We account for these trade-offs by using a split-sample and conjoint survey experiment conducted in four European countries. The results show that fiscal consolidation is not a priority for citizens: When forced to make a choice, support for reducing debt at the cost of lower spending or higher taxes is smaller than in an unconstrained setting. Revenue-based consolidations are especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidations are also contested. Moreover, the public has a clear priority order: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support more progressive taxes to pay for higher government spending.

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicized. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The paper furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.

In times of austerity and new social risks, fiscal resources are scarce. Governments have to prioritize some social policies over others, which is particularly challenging because most social policies are highly popular. However, existing research only asks about preferences towards individual social policies and fails to capture the citizens’ overall priorities regarding the trade-offs inherent in the multidimensional recalibration of welfare states. We thus study citizens’ priorities with two novel survey experiments in three European countries. We find that the average citizen has an explicit priority order: pensions and education enjoy a high, family policies a medium, and labor market policies a low priority. Yet, party and policy constituencies have different relative priorities. Our findings imply that distributive conflicts in mature welfare states are more about the distribution of resources to specific groups than welfare state support in general, and we point out potential voter coalitions for welfare state recalibration.

This chapter sheds light on the role of political parties as social investment protagonists, consenters, or antagonists in the reform of labor market and family policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Drawing on original, hand-coded data of three decades of labor market and family policy reforms in Southern Europe, the findings show divergent social investment trajectories. While Spain and Portugal have started to develop contours of a social investment agenda, little progress has been made in Italy and Greece. Programmatic political competition and government partisanship play a role in accounting for these divergent trajectories. Center-left parties have acted as the primary social investment protagonists in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. However, the Italian center-left remains fragmented and has rarely been in government. In stark contrast, both center-right and center-left parties in Greece have acted as social investment antagonists. Political and economic turmoil in the wake of the Eurozone crisis paints a bleak picture for the further development of social investment in Southern Europe. Once fiscal constraints can eventually be overcome, a core question remains as to what extent an inclusive social investment coalition can be formed in an ever more fragmented political landscape.