The Patterning of Social Policy Responsiveness

Abstract

In 2001, welfare state spending in the Scandinavian social democracies was fifty-nine percent greater than in liberal democracies, and a stunning eighty percent greater than in the United States. These are enormous differences. Do mass policy preferences help to account for the wide variation among contemporary welfare states? This chapter brings this explanation to bear on the large differences between welfare state regimes. It also considers the contribution of mass policy preferences to understanding finer-grained differences between specific countries, taking into account established factors as well. Using a new dataset from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), it suggests the existence of a strong linkage between opinion and social policy, where greater preferences are associated with higher levels of welfare state generosity. The chapter also demonstrates that mass opinion is consistently among the largest sources of cross-national patterning in the overall output of welfare states.