Public Opinion on Welfare State Recalibration in Times of Austerity: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Bremer, Björn; Bürgisser, Reto

doi:10.31235/osf.io/uj6eq

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This increasing polarization is likely to affect welfare politics significantly both in terms of the level of redistribution and its type: we do know, e.g. that trust and state capacity drive support for long-term, future-oriented social investment policies (Garritzmann, Neimanns, and Busemeyer 2016;Jacobs 2016); we also know that citizens tend to have more narrow, self-interested social policy preferences under tight fiscal constraint (Bremer and Bürgisser 2020;Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017); and finally, we know that many distributive conflicts around the welfare state can only be solved via compromising and log-rolling, which tends to require increased tax revenues that are likely to become more difficult to reap in such a context (e.g. Jacques 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudinal polarization towards the redistributive role of the state in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

Ares

Bürgisser

Häusermann

2021

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudinal polarization towards the redistributive role of the state in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

Ares

Bürgisser

Häusermann

2021

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

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“…Moreover, increased financial constraints in times of 'permanent austerity' (Pierson 2001) mean that expansions come at the cost of cutbacks elsewhere, higher taxes, or public debt. Hence, trade-offs have become crucial in policy making (Bremer and B€ urgisser 2020;Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017;H€ ausermann, Kurer, et al 2019;Stephens et al 1999), and voters are aware of these hard choices (H€ ausermann, Enggist, et al 2019). Therefore, it is reasonable that people have different policy priorities and thus different preferences for the type of welfare state they support.…”

Section: The Second Dimension Of Welfare Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, increased financial constraints in times of ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson 2001 ) mean that expansions come at the cost of cutbacks elsewhere, higher taxes, or public debt. Hence, trade-offs have become crucial in policy making (Bremer and Bürgisser 2020 ; Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017 ; Häusermann, Kurer, et al. 2019 ; Stephens et al.…”

Section: The Second Dimension Of Welfare Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We challenge this predominant view on party competition in welfare politics that RRPs blur all their economic positions. Recent arguments from welfare state literature have shown that the prevailing conflict about the welfare state is no longer concerned only with its size but rather with its goals, operating principles and whose needs the welfare state should cater to (Beramendi et al 2015;Bremer and B€ urgisser 2020;Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017). Should the welfare state prioritise investing in human skills to improve peoples' earnings capacity or should it primarily serve as a safety net?…”

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confidence: 99%

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Radical right parties and their welfare state stances – not so blurry after all?

Enggist

Pinggera

2021

West European Politics

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Recent literature shows that radical right parties (RRPs) present moderate or blurry economic stances. However, this paper argues that this blurriness is restricted to only one of the two main conflicts of contemporary welfare politics, namely questions centring on welfare generosity. In contrast, when it comes to the goals and principles the welfare state should meet, RRPs take a clear stance favouring consumption policies such as old age pensions over social investment, in accordance with their voters' preferences. The empirical analysis based on new, fine-grained coding of welfare stances in party manifestos and original data on voters' perceptions of party stances in seven European countries supports this argument. RRPs de-emphasise how much welfare state they want while consistently and clearly defending the traditional welfare state's consumptive focus against recalibration proposals. These findings have important implications for party competition and welfare politics. KEYWORDS Radical right parties; welfare state; blurring; social investment; party competition; social policyRadical right parties (RRPs) have emerged as a third pole in many West European countries' party systems (Kriesi et al. 2008;Oesch and Rennwald 2018). While it has been shown that they mobilise voters primarily on non-economic socio-cultural issues such as immigration (Ivarsflaten 2005(Ivarsflaten , 2008, their economic positions are less clear. Some scholars have depicted their positions as inconclusive (Rathgeb 2021), moderate (Afonso and Rennwald 2018; de Lange 2007), and with high variation across time and space (Afonso 2015). Moreover, in an influential article, Rovny (2013) argued that RRPs deliberately blur their positions on the economic dimension of conflict. Since the radical right attracts core CONTACT Matthias Enggist

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“…By contrast, we examine in this study whether working-and middle-class voters differ in the importance they attribute to SI. Theoretically, it makes sense to expect that people do hold actual preferences over policy importance: not only are perceptions of fiscal constraints on policy choices extremely widespread in the population (Barnes & Hicks 2018;Bremer & Bürgisser 2020), distributive outcomes of policies are also different across respondents, in particular when it comes to SI policies (Bonoli & Liechti 2018;Pavolini & Van Lancker 2018). In a context of (perceived) fiscal constraint, these differential benefits become rivals, and thus we would expect priorities to diverge.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

Häusermann

Pinggera

Ares

et al. 2021

European J Political Res

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Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy?To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and -more specifically -over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty-first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working-and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle-and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle-class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working-versus middle-class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.

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Public Opinion on Welfare State Recalibration in Times of Austerity: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Cited by 6 publications

References 34 publications

Attitudinal polarization towards the redistributive role of the state in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

Attitudinal polarization towards the redistributive role of the state in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

Radical right parties and their welfare state stances – not so blurry after all?

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

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