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Free keywords:
Welfare state, social investment, austerity, public opinion, survey experiments
Abstract:
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.
