Who Should Take Care for Them?

Abstract

Considering the different political and social backgrounds among European countries, it can be assumed that there are cross-national differences in terms of respondents’ attitudes towards welfare state institutions and ageing-related issues. How far can we differentiate between countries where governments are assigned stronger responsibilities towards public welfare, and countries with stronger individualistic attitudes towards the question “who should care for elderly people”? We will firstly analyse whether there are specific patterns which can be classified by focusing on people’s assessment of governments’ responsibilities. The second step is to identify and analyse patterns of attitudes towards care for the elderly by considering general attitudes. This leads to our multivariate analysis, in which we figure out interdependency between these patterns and particular attitudes towards care for the elderly. All in all, the responsibility of governments is seen as very high in all European countries under study. Our main finding is however that there is no correlation between the degree of attribution of responsibility towards governments and the question of whether preference is given to institutional or familial care. This means that the setting of the welfare state does not provide an explanation for attitudes towards care for the elderly.