Abstract
This article uses deliberative forums to examine attitudes to UK welfare futures. It makes methodological, empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. We demonstrate the value of the approach, provide insights into attitudes, in particular about priorities and how people link ideas together, and show how the UK’s neoliberal market-centredness fits with enthusiasm for state healthcare and pensions, desire to close national labour markets to immigrants and approval of government interventions to expand opportunities for those who make the effort. Findings point to the strength of the work ethic and individual responsibility alongside a regret that major and highly valued state services appear unsustainable, the construction of immigrants as simultaneously a burden on provision and unfair labour-market competitors, and backing for the development of a ‘new risk’ welfare state through social investment. The study reveals the complexity of responses to current challenges in an increasingly liberal-leaning welfare state.
Highlights
Welfare states faces severe social, political and economic pressures (Hemerijk 2013; Keesbergen and Vis 2014; Esping-Andersen 1990; Taylor-Gooby, Leruth and Chung 2017)
We seek to contribute in three areas: to method, by demonstrating the value of the approach, empirically, by using its capacity to explore the justifications that underpin the 'headline figures’ of attitudes to welfare and theoretically by developing the free market individualist characterisation of UK welfare state ideology to include the notion of ‘reluctant individualism’
They cannot be directed to consider specific aspects of an issue according to a researcher’s system of priorities. They are best deployed in collaboration with other methods. In this project we examine a general issue of considerable importance, where a number of factors interact to influence change and where popular understanding of current developments and of how they affect people’s interests will have an impact
Summary
Welfare states faces severe social, political and economic pressures (Hemerijk 2013; Keesbergen and Vis 2014; Esping-Andersen 1990; Taylor-Gooby, Leruth and Chung 2017). Indications of a decline in support for traditional state welfare services (Pearce and Taylor 2013), anxiety about government capacity to provide adequate services in health social care and pensions, stronger concerns about how welfare is assumed to weaken work incentives (Clery 2016) and fears about a perceived failure of government to manage immigration (Migration Observatory 2016) suggest pressures for change are strengthening, and indicate a shift away from the collectivist tradition towards greater individualism In this context, better knowledge of people’s attitudes to welfare and their priorities and how they are framed is of value (Svallfors 2012; Larsen 2008; Mewes and Mau 2013). The five sections of the article cover: pressures on the UK welfare state, in particular the trend towards greater market-centred individualism, the contribution of DFs and conventional attitude studies to understanding what people want and expect from the welfare state in the future, our method, our findings and discussion and conclusion
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