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.

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.

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.

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.