Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal before and after the Financial Crisis

Abstract

Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socioeconomic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy preferences predicts an increased polarization in opinions towards the welfare state between different groups within societyin particular between labour market insiders and outsiders. However the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualized country, Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal change and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so.

Citizens’ intention to use and recommend e-participation

“…Regarding the political attitudes and political action, Magalhães (2005) found that citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with the democratic performance. This may be due to a negative perception of political responsiveness of representative institutions (Torcal, 2014) and the economic crisis in Portugal one decade ago that negatively influenced the political attitude (Brito Vieira et al, 2017) and the political trust (van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017). The e-participation tools oriented for decision making may open an interesting opportunity to allow the citizens themselves to propose and decide on local issues, which could help to recover the trust and satisfaction in representative institutions.…”

A wave of support? A natural experiment on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the popularity of a basic income

“…However, welfare attitudes research has traditionally also recognized a competing hypothesis, labelled here as the ‘cost awareness hypothesis’. According to this view, heightened risk exposure can induce self-regarding reasoning and can weaken concerns for the well-being of the disadvantaged in society, thereby eroding public support for the welfare state (Brito Vieira et al 2017 ; Durr 1993 ; Sihvo and Uusitalo 1995 ). In times of hardship, citizens may become more aware of increasing costs and limited resources, thereby being more hesitant to support extensive government provision (Jensen and Naumann 2016 ).…”

“…With regard to the general evolution of support for a BI, existing literature wavers between two contrasting theoretical expectations of how different groups react to increased risk exposure. On the one hand, when assuming that people reason more from a self-interested perspective, different experiences of the crisis could lead groups to alter their opinions on welfare provision in various ways (Brito Vieira et al 2017 ; Forma 2002 ). This so-called ‘polarization thesis’ predicts that groups that are disproportionally affected by a crisis demand more government protection, whereas the middle and upper classes may turn against generous welfare provision because they fear the costs will rise exponentially.…”

“…Indeed, the broader literature on the impact of heightened risk exposure in times of crisis indicates that people can have a wide variety of reactions to increasing uncertainty. Although people may become more positive towards welfare provision (Cappelen et al 2021 ; Nettle et al 2021 ), it has also been argued that they may become less altruistic (Brito Vieira et al 2017 ; Jensen and Naumann 2016 ) when risks intensify. Moreover, it is very possible that the evolution in opinion is not homogeneous across social groups, as different socio-economic strata are disproportionally affected by crises and may, hence, not change their opinion in tandem (Patel et al 2020 ).…”

“…In addition, we contribute to the literature on how crises affect welfare opinions generally, as well as on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis specifically, by evaluating how increased risk exposure influences the attitudes of different types of social groups. Instead of only focusing on differences between individuals with alternative levels of precarity, as previous research has mostly done (Brito Vieira et al 2017 ; Cappelen et al 2021 ; Gonthier 2017 ), we also examine (dis)similarities across groups that experience varying levels of relative deprivation and across regional contexts . In this way, we uncover whether polarization in the impact of the COVID-19 crisis has mainly occurred in relation to individuals, social groups or regional contexts.…”