Abstract
In this last chapter, it will be asked to what extent the different institutional configurations which have been explored in previous chapters correspond to patterns of public support for welfare state intervention. In order to do so, a broader set of countries, chosen to represent different welfare state regimes both within and outside Western Europe are compared.
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Notes
Critiques of the pure rational choice-approach to institutions are found for example in Hall and Taylor (1996) and Rothstein (1996).
In this section, I only summarise the main conclusions and problems of the research on attitude patterns in different welfare regimes. For a more detailed summary of the findings and shortcomings of each individual contribution, see Svallfors, 1999b: pp. 97–99. For a selection of book-length studies on attitudes to welfare policies, see Coughlin (1980); Taylor-Gooby (1985); Svallfors (1989, 1996a); Papadakis (1990); Cook and Barrett (1992); Roller (1992); Jenssen and Martinussen (1994); Borre and Scarborough (1995); Borre and Goul Andersen (1997); Svallfors and Taylor-Gooby (1999).
Here as elsewhere in the paper “Germany” refers to the western Germany, what before 1989 was West Germany. The citizens of former East Germany were exposed to a fundamentally different welfare regime, which is also reflected in the substantial differences between former East Germans and former West Germans in their attitudes to welfare policies and redistribution (Braun and Kolosi, 1994; Roller, 1994).
The selection of countries is identical to the one in Svallfors (1997) with one exception: Austria has been replaced by France. France fielded their first ISSP survey in 1996 (from which data for this paper is used), while Austria were not able to field the 1996 survey.
For example, anyone interested in comparing attitudes to welfare policies quickly realises that asking about “välfärd” in Sweden and “welfare” in the United States is to pose two entirely different questions. The respondents in Sweden will tell you what they think about pensions, public health care and the social security system. The respondents in the United States will tell you what they think about means-tested programs targeted towards poor people, and they will in most cases also come up with a vague picture of undeserving unwed ghetto mothers or some other highly negative image (Smith, 1987).
The questionnaires may be downloaded from the ISSP page at Zentralarchiv http://www.za.uni-koeln.de/data/en/issp/(“ISSP questionnaires in PDF format”).
The study description for Australia is missing, but response rates in the ISSP surveys are normally slightly above 60%.
The French data includes a weight variable which makes it possible to make the sample representative in its composition according to gender, age, education level and labour market status. In the analyses, however, unweighted data have been used for the following reasons: a Such weighting does not guarantee any improvement in attitudinal representativity. b The differences between weighted and unweighted data are small. On the attitude scale that is used, differences amount to 0,5 on a 24-point scale. Group differences are not affected at all. Indicators of political interest and political participation are not affected by weighting the sample. c No other country in the paper applies weighting in order to correct bias in non-responses. The only weighting that exists in other countries is to correct differences in sample probabilities (Sweden and Canada, see ISSP96).
“Can’tchoose” — answers have been excluded. In the original question two items on “provide the industry with the help it needs to grow” and “impose strict laws to make industry do less damage to the environment” were also included. Since these items do not indicate welfare state commitment, and display low correlations with the other items in the table, they have been excluded from further analysis.
The index can vary between 0 and 24 with higher values indicating stronger support for state intervention.
In the literature, Sweden is often presented (mostly by non-domestic observers) as “consensual” or dominated by a “hegemonic Social Democracy’. As will be shown in the analysis, and as have been argued elsewhere, these are labels that would be much more fitting for Norway (Svallfors, 1999a).
In order to compensate for the fact that the German and Australian samples are larger than the other ones they have been weighted down to an average (n) of the other four countries. Results for unweighted data are similar to the ones presented in the table, but class and labour market status differences become somewhat smaller.
The estimates from the table should however not be interpreted quite so precisely, since significant interaction effects occur both between country and class, and between country and labour market status. As shown in Table III, this is because (a) the magnitude of class differences differ between countries and (b) the pensioners attitudes are different in Sweden and Norway compared to other countries.
Labour market status explains only 1,7% of the variance in Matheson’s attitude scale, which is less than in the countries he compares with Germany.
Such findings are present also in Svallfors (1997: Table IV) but receive little attention in the text.
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Svallfors, S. (2003). Welfare Regimes and Welfare Opinions: A Comparison of Eight Western Countries. In: Vogel, J. (eds) European Welfare Production. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0977-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0977-5_7
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