Welfare Institutions, Attitudes and Democracy

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Typological accounts are a primary feature of the literature on welfare states. These accounts trace the divergent pathways of welfare states in their levels and styles of social provisions. Public attitudes toward welfare also diverge along these institutional lines in a reflexive manner or feedback loop. Underlying the welfare provisions and attitudes of all welfare states are commitments to a democratic political system that involve free elections and political parties. This universal relationship of democracy and welfare leads us to ask: What is the relationship of attitudes toward democracy across various welfare regimes? Attitudes concerning the important features of democracy should follow to some degree how the disparate political systems of advanced democratic welfare states function. Social democracies should favor social protection over economic prosperity, liberal democracies prosperity over social protection, and conservative democracies somewhere in between. We investigate attitudes toward democracy cross-nationally using data from the most recent wave of the World Values Survey. We investigate attitudes toward prosperity and social protection in 8 nations; Australia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States, N=7,464. Results of descriptive macro-comparisons and OLS regression at the individual level demonstrate disparate political attitudes and attitude formations consistent with welfare regime typologies. Our findings show that attitude typologies emerge along welfare state typological lines suggesting that welfare attitudes are closely linked to welfare institutions. This lends strong support to the reciprocal nature of national political institutions and public attitudes. It also finds that welfare regimes in as much as they are groupings of similar national institutional styles, should be understood as phenomena worthy of continued scholarly attention, although the analysis finds some counter-evidence to the ideal-typical categorizations of welfare states.