Does social policy change impact on politics? A review of policy feedbacks on citizens’ political participation and attitudes towards politics

Abstract

This article asks how the most prominent recent changes in European welfare states are relevant for citizens’ political participation and attitudes toward politics, specifically citizens’ political efficacy, political interest, political trust and attribution of responsibility. We consider changes in benefits, in the form of generosity levels and conditionality, and changes in modes of delivery, including both marketization and rescaling. Reviewing the policy feedback on mass publics literature, a mainly US-centric scholarship, the article suggests that the mostly negative impacts that are theoretically expected are to be qualified in the European contexts. The article thereby reflects on the contributions and limits to what can be learned from this body of research to illuminate European cases; and it derives a research agenda to study policy feedbacks on mass publics in western Europe.

Citizens’ experiences of a policy-ridden environment: A methodological contribution to feedback studies based on qualitative secondary analysis

“…Our article presents how these calls, while changing the core research questions and the empirical scope of the analysis, urge to reconsider the methodological roots of the policy feedbacks literature. We show how acknowledging the multiplicity of citizens’ policy experiences and perceptions in Western Europe challenges the research designs and the causal inferences that are common in this scholarship – which is mostly US-centric and largely focuses on single policy experiences (Bussi et al, 2022).…”

“…Western European citizens do experience the state and other public authorities through manifold public policies. In addition, they live in policy-ridden environments where direct spending are comparatively higher and welfare states include more universal components in comparison to other welfare capitalist economies (Jacques and Noe ¨l, 2021;Bussi et al, 2022). These calls do not simply yield theoretical and empirical consequences.…”

“…The basic premise is that public policies are not only outputs of the political system. Rather, they are also inputs in the sense that citizens’ experience with these policies and interactions with public officials administering them are consequential for a large array of political attitudes and behaviours 1 (for recent reviews see Bussi et al, 2022; Busemeyer et al, 2021; Campbell, 2012; Larsen, 2019). Macro-level developments in the form of evolving public policies are thereby part of the context that is to be considered to account for the latter.…”

Policy Feedback & Research Methods: How Qualitative Research Designs With Marginalized Groups Inform Theory

“…This in turn, limits comparative inter-country quantitative analyses, which are not commonly found in policy feedback literature. 2 Advances in technology, data storage, and survey analyses across countries will undoubtedly lead to the proliferation of comparative longitudinal policy feedback studies some have called for (Bussi et al, 2022).…”

Abductive Coding: Theory Building and Qualitative (Re)Analysis

“…The theoretical argument at the center of the project is "policy feedback" (e.g. Pierson 1993;Campbell 2003;Mettler 2002;Bussi et al, 2022). For this article, we will focus only on two dimensions of the project-democratic linkages and neoliberalism-and on three qualitative data sets (see Appendix for a detailed description of each data set): Céline Belot's semi-structured interviews in the UK collected from 1995-6 (Belot 2000), the 2005-2006 UK CITAE focus groups (Duchesne et al 2013), and the semi-structured interviews from the Qualitative Election Study of Britain collected from 2016-7 (Carvalho, Winters and Oliver 2019).…”