Judith Raven

An Institutional Embeddedness of Welfare Opinions? The Link between Public Opinion and Social Policy in the Netherlands (1970-2004)

A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies, as well as scholars investigating institutional influences on individual welfare attitudes, find empirical evidence to support both relationships. While a relationship in both directions is plausible, scholars have yet to thoroughly investigate the mutual relationship between these two. Consequently, we still do not know under which circumstances welfare institutions invoke public approval of welfare policies and under which circumstances public opinion drives welfare policy. Taking a quantitative approach to public opinion and welfare state policies in the Netherlands, this paper addresses this issue in an attempt to increase our understanding of welfare state legitimacy. The results show that individual opinions influence relatively new policies, policies which are not yet fully established and where policy designs are still evolving and developing. Social policy, on the other hand, is found to influence individual opinions on established and highly institutionalised policies, but does not influence individual opinions in relatively new areas of social policy.

Individualization: A double-edged sword: Welfare, the experience of social risks and the need for social insurance in the Netherlands

For various reasons the process of individualization has always been supposed to be linked to a decline in welfare state support. Because of individualization, it is commonly argued people appreciate collectively organized welfare less and less. This article studies whether individualists really support the welfare state less than collectivists. In order to examine this, the authors use data collected in 2006 in the Netherlands. Distinguishing between two types of individualism, the study finds that people who are structurally disembedded from their institutional environment – the structural individualists – do not indeed support the welfare state. Moreover, for these structural individualists, the socioeconomic risks they run and their actual class position do not translate into support for the welfare state. Contrary to this, the study finds that people who can be classified as cultural individualists – those who emphasize individuality – are more supportive of the welfare state. For these cultural individualists it is also found that their socioeconomic position and interests influence the way they think about the welfare state. Cultural individualists hence are more supportive of the welfare state, and especially so for those in weak socioeconomic positions.

On support for welfare state reforms and deservingness in the Netherlands

Since the mid-1980s, welfare state arrangements have become increasingly conditional and austere. Simultaneously, deservingness perceptions have become increasingly important. This paper examines preferences as to which social categories contemporary welfare state reforms should target. Using unique data from a 2006 Dutch survey, the results reveal that the Dutch discern two principles of welfare state reforms – the first tapping into distributive reforms – decreasing redistribution, the latter tapping into commodifying reforms – increasing recommodification. Moreover, the level of peoples identification with social categories explains why the public prefers commodifying reform to be intensively targeted at some social categories, but not at others. Keywords: Deservingness, public opinion, recommodification, retrenchment, welfare state, legitimacy

Book Review: Steffen Mau and Benjamin Veghte (eds) Social Justice, Legitimacy and the Welfare State Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 282 pp., £60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0754649393

This book presents a comparative-historical study of social policy in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia (Czech and Slovak Republics since 1993) from their construction as national states to their entrance into the European Union. Tomasz Inglot skilfully explores the continuities in the making of social policies in these states under varying political regimes and systems. In this effort he presents what is to date the most comprehensive historical account of comparative social policy in the Central and East European (CEE) states. Beyond its highly valuable empirical findings in social policy, the book skilfully uses a multidimensional, historicalinstitutionalist framework for studying social policy as a continuum – affected by independent variables such as ideational foundations, state structures and agency, and social insurance institutions and programmes – rather than affiliating policy reformwith the regime change as suggested bymost of the ‘Transition’ and ‘Europeanization’ literatures. Hence, the welfare state remains the research problem of the book in order to explore the historical legacies of social policy in the CEE states and how and why they re-emerge. The main contribution of Inglot’s book is its finding that national institutional arrangements of the welfare state show great endurance across time and different political and socioeconomic regimes, with certain clearly discernible patterns of social policy within each country persisting and often re-emerging in similar configurations in different historical periods (p. 2). Inglot uses certain institutional variation dimensions in order to inspect the social policy institutions in the CEE states. The longitudinal analysis shows that themost important dimensions of variation are timing, sequencing and the duration of the periods of expansion and retrenchment. These dimensions point at two historical trajectories at the foundation, expansion and finally retrenchment of the welfare state and social policy development. How the system of social benefits operates as a dynamic and evolving set of institutions at different historical periods, and how much each welfare state delivers in terms of benefits and programmes within a specific programme and across time thereby enters into analysis in the book. Inglot concentrates on institutional and policy legacies in what he calls ‘the long-term evolution of many vital but often less visible and rarely studied benefit programmes that rely on cash payments to individuals and their families’. Hence, the social insurance programmes under analysis in this book include pensions, sickness/maternity benefits, and family/child care allowances. While selecting these cases, Inglot also recognizes that the book leaves out institutional development and policy outcomes in the newer, less entrenched programmes such as healthcare services, housing, education, social services and unemployment (p. 42). Although this selection limits the scope of research, the author shows the validity of his hypotheses in the programmes which he selects. Further research into the programmes left out in the book, under the theoretical compass of Inglot’s volume, can specify Inglot’s hypotheses and look for further scope conditions for their applicability. While the time frame under research in the book covers the period until the EU accession of the states under study, and the author does not say much about developments in social policy after the end of the 1990s, the book is still a useful compass to understand the historical and social background of many contemporary social policies and agencies. Its methodology is sound and the empirical material is impressive. It fills a major gap in the history of the welfare state in the CEE states and prepares the ground for further research into how Europeanization, on the one hand, and historical legacies, on the other hand, flow together in the making of social policies. This book should certainly be a requirement for reading lists of graduate or undergraduate courses in East European Politics, Social Policy and Public Policy.

Book Review: Christian Albrekt Larsen, The Institutional Logic of Welfare Attitudes: How Welfare Regimes Influence Public Support. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006, 184 pp., £45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0754648575

This book provides an assessment of how different welfare regimes produce their own degree of individual welfare state support. The aim of Albrekt Larsen’s book is ‘to search for the mechanisms that link the macro-structures of welfare regimes to the micro-structure of public opinion towards welfare policy’ (p. 2). Where other studies show a regimedependent pattern in attitudes at the aggregate level, they appear unable to explain these patterns. In The Institutional Logic of Welfare Attitudes, Albrekt Larsen searches for this missing link and attempts to prove its existence empirically. To theoretically link welfare institutions to welfare attitudes, Albrekt Larsen combines welfare regime theory with the literature on deservingness. In so doing, he builds upon Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime theory. The main logic put forth here is that liberal, conservative and social democratic welfare regimes vary in their approaches towards ‘bad risks’ and, in turn, these approaches produce different welfare attitudes. Three dimensions of welfare regimes are distinguished: the degree of selectivism in welfare policy, the level of generosity in welfare policy, and job opportunities in the labour market. The author contends that these dimensions determine the direction of discussions on deservingness, covering perceptions of five deservingness criteria: who is in need (need); who is to blame (control); who belongs to ‘us’ (identity); reciprocal fairness (reciprocity); and gratitude of recipients (attitude). Essentially, the three dimensions of welfare regimes are likely to influence the degree to which the poor and unemployed are able to fulfil these five criteria. The deservingness literature shows that the more the poor and unemployed answer to these criteria, the more individuals are likely to believe that the poor and unemployed deserve support from the government. As a result, public support for the poor and unemployed will vary across regimes. Albrekt Larsen tests this theory using data from several surveys, including the World Values Surveys, Eurobarometer surveys and ISSP surveys. The empirical results show that a regime-dependent pattern is present in perceptions of deservingness (criterion control). In liberal regimes, a high proportion of individuals believe that the poor are in control of their own poverty. This proportion decreases in conservative regimes, and is even lower in social democratic regimes. Next, the author demonstrates a connection between cross-national differences in perceptions on whether the poor and unemployed are in control of their own poverty and public support for welfare policy. Supplementary analyses (used to overcome the small n-problem) in a most-similar-cases design (in the Nordic countries) show that two welfare regime dimensions – the degree of selectivism and generosity – affect perceptions of the deservingness criterion identity. Finally, after proving that perceptions of the poor and unemployed are regimedependent, Albrekt Larsen investigates support in greater detail in a single national context (Denmark). These analyses show that variation in perceptions of the poor and unemployed can explain much of the variation in public support for social assistance. Given the limitations of the available cross-national data, the empirical contribution of the book is original and quite impressive. Nevertheless, the study is not always consistent in addressing whether deservingness criteria are tested directly (by investigating deservingness criteria) or indirectly (by investigating perceptions on three regime dimensions, which – according to the book’s theory – represent deservingness). Furthermore, although the empirical contribution of the book is quite convincing, Albrekt Larsen makes one disputable choice which seems crucial to his conclusions, namely he defines the Netherlands as a social democratic regime. Yet, the Netherlands is arguably a hybrid welfare regime, containing elements of all three ideal types, and is most often defined as a conservative, corporatist regime (this is the definition used by Esping-Andersen from 1999, revising his previous argument in 1990 that the Netherlands should be defined as a social democratic regime). This shift in categories could affect Albrekt Larsen’s regime-dependent findings. Looking at the figures presented in Chapter 5, it seems imperative to Albrekt Larsen’s argument that the Netherlands be defined as a social democratic regime in order to distinguish the regime-dependent attitude pattern. If the Netherlands were defined as a conservative regime, these empirical results might be less in line with Albrekt Larsen’s theoretical expectations. In sum, The Institutional Logic of Welfare Attitudes addresses an important deficiency in welfare state research. Although the empirical findings may be problematic given the country-classification of the different regimes, the book provides an interesting and promising theory on the micro-level foundation of welfare attitudes. This book will definitely be of considerable interest in future cross-national welfare attitude research.