Romke van der Veen

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.

The Transformation of Solidarity : Changing Risks and the Future of the Welfare State

This study investigates the consequences of processes of social individualisation and economic globalisation for welfare state solidarity. Solidarity is defined as the willingness to share risks. The institutions of the welfare state, such as social security or health care insurance, are founded on the willingness of citizens to share risks and organize solidarity between the young and the old, between the healthy and the sick, between the working and the unemployed. Processes of individualisation and globalisation affect these risks and in this study the authors investigate how and to what extent these changes influence the way risks are perceived by the public, what this means for the willingness to share risks and how this is translated in risk management strategies in firms, unions and administrative agencies. [Publisher website]

Modern working life: A blurring of the boundaries between secondary and primary labour markets?

Today, there is a widespread suggestion that permanent workers are increasingly subject to precarious working conditions. Due to international competition and declining union density, job qualities of permanent workers are assumed to be under strain. According to proponents of a democratization of risk rationale, low job qualities that were traditionally attached to secondary labour markets are transferred to workers in primary segments of the labour market. In this study, the authors test this theoretical rationale among workers in 11 Western European economies, using two waves of the European Working Conditions Survey. The results do not confirm a democratization of labour market risk. Lower job qualities are highly associated with flexible employment contracts and highlight a clear gap between insiders and outsiders.

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

Adult children stepping in? Long-term care reforms and trends in children’s provision of household support to impaired parents in the Netherlands.

ABSTRACT Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services relieve family members from the obligations to care for relatives in need, to supported familialism, in which family involvement in care-giving is fostered through support and recognition for families in keeping up their caring responsibilities. Using data from four waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,197), we show that between 2002 and 2014 the predicted probability that adult children provide occasional household support to impaired parents rose substantially. Daughters more often provided household support to parents than did sons, but no increase in the gender gap over time was found. We could not attribute the increase in childrens provision of household support to drops in the use of state-supported household services. The finding that more and more adult children are stepping in to help their ageing parents fits a more general trend in the Netherlands of increasing interactions in intergenerational families.

Contextualising institutional complementarity. How long-term unemployment depends on employment protection legislation, active labour market policies and the economic climate: Contextualising institutional complementarity

This study investigated if and how active labour market policies (ALMPs) and employment protection interact with each other in light of long‐term unemployment reduction. We argue that how well the interaction between both labour market institutions reduces long‐term unemployment depends on the level of economic growth. To improve analytical clarity, two types of ALMPs were differentiated, namely training and employment programmes. Using data on 20 European countries over 16 years, our results suggest that employment protection moderates the relationship between employment programmes and long‐term unemployment. The combination of high spending on employment programmes and less strict employment protection is associated with less long‐term unemployment. This moderation effect is stronger during an economic downturn. A moderation effect from employment protection on the relationship between training programmes and long‐term unemployment was not found, even when the economic climate was taken into account as a contextual factor.

30 april 1980 en de journalistiek. Kanttekeningen bij het journalistieke perspectief.

Journalists & sociologists have frequently criticized each other for having too narrow a focus in their examination of social phenomena. To test the hypothesis that the journalists are better social scientists than are the sociologists themselves, an analysis was conducted of 12 Dutch newspaper articles & radio & TV reports on the Amsterdam riots of 30 Apr 1980. Additionally, interview data were collected from journalists (N = 38) concerning their coverage & analyses of the causes of the disturbances. It is shown that the journalists have a naive empirical concept of reality & are preoccupied with the institutionalization of their own profession; their description of social reality suffers from these limitations. Thus, sociologists are better social scientists than journalists, in contrast to the hypothesis. Modified HA.