Preferences in Context

Abstract

Political economists have increasingly looked to understand social welfare policy as a product of individual-level demand for social spending. This work hypothesizes that individuals with riskier jobs demand more social spending and that large welfare states emerge where there are more of such individuals. In this article we build on the “policy feedback” literature to argue that existing welfare institutions condition how individual-level factors affect social policy preferences. Specifically, we argue that institutions directly altering the risk of unemployment (employment protection legislation) and those that delink benefits from the labor market create a more uniform system of social risk that reduces the importance of individual-level risk in shaping policy preferences. We test these propositions using multilevel analysis of 19 advanced industrial countries in 2006. We find that individual risk matters for social policy preferences only where employment protection is low and welfare benefits are dependent on employment.