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ABSTRACT
Social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro level. We expand this perspective by studying public opinion towards social investment compared to other welfare policies, exploiting new public opinion data from eight European countries. We identify three latent dimensions of welfare state preferences: ‘social investment’; ‘passive transfers’; and ‘workfare’ policies. We find that social investment is far more popular compared to the other two. Furthermore, we identify distinct supporting groups: passive transfer policies are most supported by low-income, low-educated people, by individuals leaning towards traditional social values and by those subscribing to left-wing economic attitudes. Social investment policies are supported by a broad coalition of individuals with higher educational backgrounds and left-libertarian views from all economic strata. Workfare policies are most popular with high-income individuals and those subscribing to economically conservative and traditional authoritarian values.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank participants of the workshop ‘The Future of the Social Investment State’, at the University of Lausanne, at the Workshop ‘Aktivierend - investiv - prädistributiv: Neue Paradigmen in der Sozialpolitik(forschung)?’ of the DVPW Working Group “Vergleichende Wohlfahrtsstaatenforschung” at the University of Kassel, and at the CES conference in Glasgow. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Julian L. Garritzmann is senior researcher at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the University of Zurich, Zurich.
Marius R. Busemeyer is professor of political science at the University of Konstanz.
Erik Neimanns is senior researcher at the University of Konstanz.
Notes
1 The ESS includes some questions on childcare and the ISSP Role of Government modules include a question on public education spending. But hitherto these surveys do not cover a broader range of social investment policies.
2 While the wording of some of the items is relatively complex, our pretests indicated that respondents understood the logic of the reform proposal sufficiently well. Thus they should provide valid measures. Most items mention several reform measures simultaneously. This has the drawback that respondents might value the individual components of the reform measures differently. But the question wording reflects our aim to present realistic reform proposals that are comparable across countries and avoid getting lost in specific reform details. The first and fourth item are replications from the Eurobarometer 56.1 (e.g., Kananen et al. Citation2006).
3 If we treat responses on the five-point Likert scales as ordinal rather than continuous and use a polychoric correlation matrix as input for the principal component factor analysis (Welkenhuysen-Gybels et al. Citation2003), the findings remain unchanged.
4 Sweden also stands out because early retirement loads negatively on the ‘passive transfers’ dimension. We discuss the particularities of the issue of early retirement, which help to make sense of this outlying value, in more detail below.
5 As an alternative, one could run multilevel/hierarchical random-effects models. These models yield the same coefficient estimates as the specification we use, but slightly larger standard errors. As the number of level 2 observations is relatively small (Nj = 8), we chose the common standard.
6 In the Online Appendix, Figures A1–A2 and Table A4, Models 4–9, we present additional models estimated separately for each policy proposal.