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The Impact of Social Policy on Democratic Citizenship

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The Welfare State and the Democratic Citizen

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ((PSEPS))

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Abstract

Using multilevel regression models with cross-level interactions between income and social expenditures, the hypotheses on how the welfare state can shape democratic citizenship is empirically tested. Voting, political interest, political trust, and satisfaction with democracy are all found to be higher in countries where a policy priority on working-age adults and families exists. More nuanced patterns are, however, found with regard to the social gradient in democratic citizenship: while larger welfare states appear to promote greater political equality across some aspects of democratic citizenship, the gap between the richest and poorest citizens remains even in generous welfare states with regard to political trust.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All individuals under the age of 18 have been omitted from the sample. While voting age in Austria has been lowered to 16, at the time the survey was conducted, the legal voting age was still 18. In Slovenia the voting age is 16 for employed persons; there are, however, no employed 16-year-olds in the sample.

  2. 2.

    Historical and cross-national official turnout rates are available from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA): https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/voter-turnout (Accessed February11, 2017).

  3. 3.

    In the European Social Survey (ESS), for example, before being asked about voting , respondents are first told, “Some people don’t vote nowadays for one reason or another ” (European Social Survey 2010).

  4. 4.

    As Lijphart (1997) speculated and Hooghe and Pelleriaux (1998) show for Belgium, compulsory voting is able to reduce some of the inequalities of voter turnout .

  5. 5.

    See Stadelmann-Steffen’s (2011) article on female labor market participation and family policy for an excellent discussion on the identification and classification on group-specific policy effects.

  6. 6.

    In the analysis, age is included both as an absolute value (age in years) and as a quadratic term in order to allow for the possibility that the relationship between age and voting could be curvilinear in nature. Both terms are centered around the grand mean (Hox 2002, 56).

  7. 7.

    I describe and explain the models and procedures in much greater depth in the present analysis on voting than in the subsequent analyses, as the basic structure of the models remains more or less the same.

  8. 8.

    This line of argumentation is highly speculative ; Schattschneider (1960, 105–107), however, added that even in the face of high inequality , the wealthier will continue to be motivated to participate in politics because conflicts of interest among the upper classes remain (see also Solt 2008).

  9. 9.

    Although the same data sources and countries are used for the voting and political analyses, the number of respondents differs due to the varying number of missing values on the two outcome variables.

  10. 10.

    The World Values Survey (WVS) asks a question about confidence in political institutions, including parliament. Not only is the wording of the question quite different, but the question also relies on an ordinal measurement scale. In order to ensure comparability across countries, I only include responses from the European Social Survey , as it covers the greatest number of countries with uniform question wording.

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  1. Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Jennifer Shore

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Shore, J. (2019). The Impact of Social Policy on Democratic Citizenship. In: The Welfare State and the Democratic Citizen. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93961-2_5

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