Overloaded or Undermined?

Abstract

How do citizens’ evaluations of welfare state-related policy outputs feed back into the political system in the shape of updated political orientations and behavior? How do the nature and direction of such effects vary depending on institutional configurations in particular countries? This paper tries to answer these questions using the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey, focusing on 17 West European welfare states. Unlike all reasonably recent comparative opinion surveys, these data simultaneously include measures of several dependent variables as well as evaluations of welfare-state related outcomes and public services. Empirically, the chapter tries to answer the following questions: Does dismay with welfare state performance undermine normative support for government intervention and welfare spending? Or perhaps poor performance leads to exactly the opposite: to new demands for even more spending and intervention, thus potentially overloading already constrained welfare states? Moreover, what are the effects on incumbent government support, and general support for the political system? Finally, how do these effects vary across political and welfare state-related institutional settings? The results show that dissatisfaction has a (weak) negative impact on general support for state intervention, and that it has a certain potential for undermining incumbent government support. These effects, however, are strongly conditioned by both political institutions and welfare state institutions. The statistical models predict a major impact only in Social Democratic welfare states with little political power dispersion. Finally, there is a strong and consistent negative impact of dissatisfaction on general political trust. This latter impact can be found in all investigated countries and is not affected by their institutional configuration. The concluding section discusses the development of welfare state politics in an era of resource-scarcity and popular dissatisfaction.