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Abstract
Recent studies assume that the middle class’s commitment to the welfare state has gradually eroded through the implementation of neoliberal policies. This article takes a more nuanced view by addressing the increasing heterogeneity within the middle class. It first shows that large segments of the middle class hold composite attitudes toward public spending. Small business owners combine moderate support for social spending with strong support for spending cuts. Likewise, technicians combine average support for social spending with average support for spending cuts. They differ from socio-cultural professionals who strongly support social spending and at the same time strongly oppose cuts in public spending. Results also indicate that support for spending cuts decreases in countries where public spending is deemed efficient, most notably among socio-cultural and technical professionals. Thus, it is argued that the middle class’s mixed loyalties can best be interpreted as evidence of a demand for government efficacy rather than as a sign of increasing conservatism.
Note on author
Frédéric Gonthier is a specialist in international social surveys. Associate Professor at Sciences Po Grenoble-PACTE/CNRS, he is the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) coordinator in France and a member of the Methodology Group of the European Values Survey (EVS). His research focuses on attitudes toward government and economic liberalism in Europe and has appeared in journals such as European Journal of Political Research, French Politics and Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia. His most recent (co-edited) book is European Values: Trends and Divides over Thirty Years (2017, Brill).
Notes
1 The reverse may also occur. In Greece and Portugal, the electoral breakthrough of the radical left resulted from a coalition between the working class and the middle class (most of them young and urban) against austerity measures.
2 Over the years, the topics of attitude ambivalence and ideological consistency have elicited growing interest from political scientists. One key result from the literature is that social welfare ambivalence – defined as the propensity to hold both positive and negative views toward the welfare state – is not due to cognitive dysfunction. All individuals are likely to endorse ambivalent attitudes when faced with cognitive conflict, affective conflict, or cognitive-affective conflict (Craig and Martinez Citation2005; Gainous, Craig, and Martinez Citation2008; Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen Citation2012; Steenbergen and Brewer Citation2004).
3 Political scientists have also devoted a great deal of attention to the methodological issues raised by the measurement of support for government spending (Jacoby Citation2000; Rasinski Citation1989; Smith Citation1987, Citation2006).
4 The meaning of the “middle class” also changes over time and across countries (Kocka Citation1995).
5 ZA6900 (v2.0.0), doi:10.4232/1.13052.
6 Namely, Australia (AU), Belgium (BE), Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Great Britain (GB), Hungary (HU), Iceland (IS), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), New Zealand (NZ), Norway (NO), Russia (RU), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), Switzerland (CH), United States (US).
7 Response categories range from “spend much less” (1) to “spend much more” (5).
8 On a five-point answer scale from “strongly against” (1) to “strongly in favor” (5).
9 More specifically, I used the script to construct an indicator of social class and provided this for the latest rounds of the European Social Survey (http://people.unil.ch/danieloesch/scripts/). This script is based on (4-digit) ISCO08 and employment status (i.e., employee, self-employed, working for own family business). The same two variables are also documented in the recent ISSP datasets. I customized the ESS script to match the variables from the ISSP Role of Government 2016.
10 For the European Union, see Hugrée, Penissat, and Spire (Citation2017).
11 This should not come as a surprise. In Southern Europe, the middle class have become poorer in the wake of the Great Recession.
12 Note that the two macro-level indicators are not strongly correlated (r = 0.14) and can thus be jointly included in the models.
13 For the sake of clarity, the null models (i.e., with no explanatory variables) were not displayed. As expected in light of the strong variations across countries, multilevel modeling turned out to be appropriate for the two dependent variables, with ICC equal to 0.11 and to 0.19, respectively. For the sake of consistency with the linear model, the spending cuts categorical response variable was treated as a continuous variable. To be sure, additional analyses were conducted with an ordinal logistic random-effects model. Results are identical.
14 I also checked for multicollinearity with simple regression models and found no issue with the VIF statistics.
15 The left-right scale is not accurate in many ISSP countries. Thus, political ideology is also derived from the party that respondents voted for in the last general election.
16 ILO data is gathered from various institutional sources (i.e., Eurostat, IMF, OECD). In most cases, 2015 is the latest available year (2014 for Croatia and Lithuania).
17 A 0.03 estimate corresponds to a three per cent variation of the index.
18 Additional models with random slopes for social class (to let the linkage between support for social spending and social class vary from country to another) were also estimated. Differences between social classes hold.
19 Significant differences remain when random slopes for social class are estimated.
20 Predicted values include the fixed-portion linear prediction plus contributions based on the predicted random effects.
21 The two overlapping labels at the bottom right are Finland (FI) and Sweden (SE).