How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public

In democracies, citizens’ attitudes and behaviour should influence future public policies. In practice, however, the reverse may also be true: attitudes and behaviour can be results of past policies. This paper takes stock of evidence about such policy feedback in European welfare states. Currently, many European welfare states are being restructured and adapted. In some of them, painful and dramatic austerity measures are implemented in the wake of the great recession and the euro-zone sovereign debt crisis. All of this calls for an empirically grounded understanding of how policies, and policy change, influence the democratic public. While the idea of policy feedback has a long intellectual history in social science it is still a newcomer to empirical political behaviour research. Against, this backdrop, this paper considers how welfare states shape three crucial facets of the democratic public: political participation, voting behaviour, and political attitudes (including performance evaluations, welfare support and democratic satisfaction). We discuss how these are structured by slowly accumulating policy legacies as well as by shorter-term policy change. A diverse menu of methodological designs converges on the conclusion that welfare states shape crucial facets of the democratic public. Equally important, however, there are many contingencies and complexities. Policy feedback is best uncovered in analyses that conceptualize and measure specific and immediately relevant aspects of polices themselves. It is contingent on the interests, information and evaluations of citizens, and on the political context.

The paper is based on the book “How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public” (published by Edward Elgar, 2013).