Employing new and original survey data collected in three waves (April/May and November 2020 as well as May 2021) in Germany, this paper studies the dynamics of individual-level support for ...additional health care spending. A first major finding is that, so far, health care spending preferences have not radically changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, at least at the aggregate level. A more detailed analysis reveals, secondly, that individual-level support for additional spending on health care is strongly conditioned by performance perceptions and, to a lesser extent, general political trust. Citizens who regard the system as badly (well) prepared to cope with the crisis are more likely to support (oppose) additional spending. Higher levels of political trust are also positively associated with spending support, but to a lesser degree. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for policy-making and welfare state politics in the post-pandemic era.
The media welfare state: A citizen perspective Lindell, Johan; Jakobsson, Peter; Stiernstedt, Fredrik
European journal of communication (London),
06/2022, Letnik:
37, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of ...the “media welfare state” are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey (n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Using exploratory statistical analysis, we identify a media welfare state of mind. While widespread in the population, this attitudinal constellation is more common in older segments of the population, in the working-class, and by those who frequently use and trust public service media. The main conclusion is that support for the media welfare state primarily can be explained by political attitudes, where left-leaning and GAL-oriented individuals are more positive than people holding right-wing and TAN-attitudes.
Environmental problems – particularly climate change – have become increasingly important to governments and social researchers in recent decades. Debates about their implications for social policies ...and welfare reforms are now moving towards centre stage. What has been missing from such debates is an account of the history of the welfare state in relation to environmental issues and green ideas.
A Green History of the Welfare State fills this gap. How have the environmental and social policy agendas developed? To what extent have welfare systems been informed by the principles of environmental ethics and politics? How effective has the welfare state been at addressing environmental problems? How might the history of social policies be reimagined? With its lively, chronological narrative, this book provides answers to these questions. Through overviews of key periods, politicians and reforms the book weaves together a range of subjects into a new kind of historical tapestry, including: social policy, economics, party politics, government action and legislation, and environmental issues.
This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental policy and history, social and public policy, social history, sociology and politics.
We suggest that the effects of needs for security and certainty (NSC) on economic beliefs result from potentially competing dispositional (political engagement) and contextual (the country-level ...political narrative around the welfare state) influences. An analysis of data from the 2016 European Social Survey (N = 40,870) showed that at low levels of political engagement, NSC is associated with left-wing beliefs. However, at high levels of political engagement, the NSC effects are conditional on a country’s welfare state model: NSC is related to right-wing beliefs in Liberal, Continental, and Southern types, but the effects are nonsignificant in the Nordic type and the reverse under the Eastern type. Analysis of 2018 round of the same survey (N = 45,575) corroborated the main findings (except the Southern type for which NSC effects were nonsignificant). This study advances knowledge on the psychological roots of economic beliefs and contributes to the understanding of people’s political choices.
The question to what extent voters punish governments for cutting the welfare state is an unsettled issue in social policy research. Our contribution addresses this shortcoming by systematically ...analyzing how media reporting about legislative changes to the welfare state affects the public agenda and citizens' vote intentions while controlling for the influence of actual cutbacks and expansions. In our analysis we examine the case of Germany from 1994 to 2014; a period where major cutbacks but also significant expansions to the German welfare state occurred. We find that mass media reporting about pension cutbacks is associated with a drop in government approval, whereas the reaction to expansive legislative changes is muted. We also find that the relationship of media reporting and government approval strongly depends on who is in government with the social democrats being punished harder than the Christian democrats.
The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post‐industrial knowledge economies. Experts and ...policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a ‘social investment’ model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what conditions are citizens willing to accept such future‐oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hitherto neglected role of citizens’ trust in and satisfaction with government. Trust and satisfaction matter because future‐oriented reforms generate uncertainties, risks and costs, which trust and government satisfaction can attenuate. We offer micro‐level causal evidence using experiments in a representative survey covering eight European countries and confirm these findings with European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We find that trust and government satisfaction increase reform support and moderate the effects of self‐interest and ideological standpoints. These findings have crucial implications not least because they help explain why some countries manage – but others fail – to enact important reforms.
Who reacts politically to fiscally costly immigration? A political economy tradition holds that reactions depend on economic self-interest, whereas a social psychology tradition emphasizes ...generalized political orientations and trust. Past work largely leans in favor of the latter tradition. We make three contributions. First, our dependent variable is a concrete perception of welfare state sustainability, arguably better suited to capture self-interest. Second, both the political economy- and social psychology traditions have been studied narrowly; we separate between multiple interests (including economic local context), and compare several types of trust orientations. Third, we use machine learning methods well-suited to analyze treatment heterogeneity in a randomized survey experiment. We find support for both interest-based and social psychological explanations. As for the latter, what matters is not only, or even mainly, orientations/trust related to immigration. Rather, generalized political distrust strongly regulates when costly immigration cues trigger welfare sustainability worries.
We had tried to argue about the impact of the global pandemic over the Latin American societies and States and by doing a brief summary about the states capacities and current level of welfare ...analyze the political possibilities for building a new goal of welfare and solidarity guaranteed by collective regulations.
Hemos pretendido reflexionar respecto a las dimensiones políticas e institucionales que se han visto interpeladas por la irrupción de la pandemia global en nuestros países y, a partir de este análisis, plantear en qué planos se encuentran las restricciones u oportunidades para la construcción de políticas públicas que amplíen y profundicen las condiciones de bienestar para la mayoría de la población de nuestra región.
How does the educational divide impact contemporary redistributive politics in the knowledge economy? Traditional political economy models which see education as a labour market asset predict the ...relatively secure educated will oppose redistribution, while the precarious less‐educated will support it. In contrast, a conception of education as a marker of social status suggests that the less‐educated may be more inclined than status‐secure university graduates to draw harsh boundaries against welfare state beneficiaries as a means to maintain social esteem. Building on both theoretical approaches, I analyze 2016 European Social Survey data from 15 Western European countries. I find that education has a negative relationship to support for an expansive welfare state. By contrast, education is strongly positively associated with perceptions of welfare state beneficiaries as deserving.
This has implications for education as a structural divide in electoral politics. Evidence that attitudes towards the scope of the welfare state mediate the effects of education on vote choice is mixed. However, KHB mediation analyses decomposing the effects of education on vote choice reveal that deservingness perceptions are a particularly substantial mediator of education effects on voting for radical right and green parties. This explains in part why these parties represent the poles of the educational divide, whose attitudinal basis is usually understood to be socio‐cultural rather than redistributive.
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