Deservingness perceptions, welfare state support and vote choice in Western Europe

Abstract

In today’s diversified party systems, the economic dimension is no longer a unidimensional conflict between pro-redistribution voters of the left and anti-redistribution voters of the right. Analyzing 2016 European Social Survey data for 15 Western European countries, this article argues that perceptions of the deservingness of benefit recipients and attitudes towards the scope of the welfare state are distinct, powerful predictors of vote choice. The effects of attitudes on these two subdimensions are strong and congruent in predicting voting for older party families. Deservingness perceptions are an even more powerful predictor of voting for green and radical right parties, while attitudes towards the scope of the welfare state are not significant predictors of voting for either. Disaggregating the economic left/right reveals that certain types of redistribution attitudes predict vote choice even for parties known for their positions on ‘non-economic’ issues like immigration and European integration.

Keywords:

• redistribution attitudes
• deservingness
• vote choice
• political ideology
• welfare state politics

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from comments from many colleagues to whom I express my deepest gratitude. First, thanks to Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe, Rahsaan Maxwell, Marc Hetherington, Jan Rovny, Leah Christiani, Andreas Jozwiak, Lucy Britt, Eroll Kuhn, Ted Enamorado and Kaitlin Alper for their valuable suggestions. Second, thanks to the participants of the May 3–4 2019 Partisan Divides Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill, and particularly Sara Hobolt in her capacity as discussant, for their helpful comments. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers and editors of West European Politics for their thoughtful and constructive input throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Scholars have used several different labels to describe this party family, including populist right, far right, and Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist (TAN) (see Golder 2016, 481–82). I use the term radical right because it is the most commonly used in the field.

2 The division in values between opponents and supporters of transnationalism is expressed in a new dimension of political conflict which scholars use different labels to capture, but which are conceptually similar: post-materialism (Inglehart 1977), cosmopolitanism vs. parochialism (De Vries 2018), particularism vs. universalism (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015), libertarianism vs. authoritarianism (Kitschelt 1994), the group dimension (Kitschelt and Rehm 2014), demarcation vs. integration (Kriesi et al. 2006; Kriesi et al. 2008) or Green/Alternative/Libertarian (GAL) vs. Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist (TAN) (Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002).

3 In a particularly illustrative example, Bullock (1999) finds that poor American benefit recipients were themselves more likely than middle class respondents to support the claim that welfare recipients are lazy or dishonest, while opposing cuts to welfare and maintaining that welfare programs themselves were socially legitimate. Middle class respondents, meanwhile, were less likely to make negative character judgements about the poor but more likely to support cuts and reject the legitimacy of welfare programs in the first place.

4 Still other contributions in the literature on ‘other-oriented’ motives for redistributive attitudes present a model of parochial altruism compatible both with theories rooted in welfare chauvinism or in other forms of status competition (Shayo 2009; Lupu and Pontusson 2011).

5 Cavaillé (2014) and Cavaillé and Trump (2015) refer to these two dimensions of redistribution attitudes as ‘Redistribution To (the poor)’ and ‘Redistribution From (the rich)’, respectively.

6 More specifically, scholars have found that perceptions of the work ethic of recipients and the degree of control they have over their economic circumstances have an important effect on people’s evaluations of their deservingness (Feather 1999; Fincham and Jaspars 1980; Magni forthcoming). Research by political psychologists argues that deservingness perceptions result from a pre-political, automatic heuristic which motivates individuals to help the genuinely needy within their in-group while harshly punishing free riders, a tendency with roots in evolutionary psychology (Petersen et al. 2011; Petersen 2012; Petersen 2015; Jensen and Petersen 2017).

7 For a similar approach geared towards explaining perceptions of welfare beneficiaries generally rather than the relative merit of different groups, see Roosma et al. (2016).

8 Houtman et al. (2008) is an important exception in its linking of working class authoritarianism to both strong preferences for conditionality and populist right voting.

9 The countries are Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. These countries have different party systems, which means the choice set for voters varies across them. Since I am interested in capturing the relationship between redistribution attitudes and vote choice across a range of party systems, I retain a pooled sample. However, to demonstrate the robustness of my results, Online Appendix C contains an analysis of a restricted sample of ten countries with the same constellation of party families. The results are substantively unchanged.

10 Since the article must present a series of statistical analyses of the effects of two different attitudinal subdimensions across many different party families, I combine Christian democratic and conservative parties into one category for parsimony’s sake. This also allows for greater comparability across countries, since some countries may have only a conservative party or a Christian democratic party, but not both.

11 Other survey research operationalises the concept of deservingness with reference to perceptions of specific groups, rather than as a general orientation. Such research employs questions asking if specific groups deserve more or less money from the welfare state than they currently receive (Jeene et al., 2014), if respondents are concerned about the living standards of a group (Van Oorschot, 2006), about their relative concern for each group in relation to others (Ibid), or directly if groups are deserving of state financial assistance or not (Van Oorschot, 2000; Jensen and Petersen, 2017). The factor analysis approach used here has several benefits. Methodologically, combining multiple measures reduces the measurement error associated with using single survey items to capture attitudes (Ansolabehere et al. 2008). This approach also accounts for the fact that deservingness is a multi-faceted concept which may be hard to fully capture with a single measure. Substantively, the choice to measure deservingness as a general orientation towards the needy rather than a relative evaluation of individual groups is more appropriate for highlighting variation across different party family electorates.

12 For the sake of space, I only display predicted probabilities for radical right and green voters, whose support I expect to be most strongly related to deservingness perceptions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Attewell

David Attewell is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research focuses on redistribution attitudes, perceptions of inequality and the relationship between socio-structural change and voting behaviour. [[email protected]]