Public opinion on policy and budgetary trade-offs in European welfare states: evidence from a new comparative survey
By Marius R. Busemeyer, Julian L. Garritzmann. Political Budgeting Across Europe, 2017
131 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT In the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, welfare states have entered a new phase of austerity. Simultaneously, new social risks and the rise of the knowledge economy fuel new demands on the welfare state. We analyse how demands for social investment policies – particularly education – come into conflict with budgetary concerns, using new survey data on individual-level preferences in eight European countries. Paying particular attention to fiscal and budgetary trade-offs, we find that social investments are generally very popular, but as soon as realistic budget constraints are added, public support drops considerably. The largest drop occurs when social investments would be financed with cutbacks in social transfers rather than higher taxes or higher public debt levels. Furthermore, when studying the determinants of preferences, we find that in the era of permanent austerity distributive conflicts within welfare states exhibit a different political dynamic than conflicts about the size of the welfare state.
Subfields: Demography, Finance, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4452e2ffe16ce17fa8534e4e2e4148f359aad6cd
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Demography
In Finance
In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Public demand for social investment: new supporting coalitions for welfare state reform in Western Europe? (2018, background): “There are empirical indications that individual social investment policies such as education and childcare are popular, but there is no solid evidence on the popularity of the social investment model in its entirety (but see Busemeyer et al. 2017; Busemeyer and Garritzmann 2017b).”