Popular support for social benefits constitutes one of the primary hindrances against retrenchment, but what motivates these attitudes? The literature on welfare attitudes offers two predominant explanations: self-interest, and perceptions of social justice. As a latecomer to the literature on welfare attitudes policy feedback suggest an additional explanation; that policies are not only an expression of attitudes of the voters, but also shape attitudes though a feedback loop.
The paper shows that all three theories should be combined in interpreting attitude patterns. The data are selected from a large Danish welfare attitude survey and focuses on attitudes towards five social benefits. The unique feature of data is that it contains very detailed measurement of usage and proximity to the social benefits, enabling the paper to go into much more detail than usually found regarding personal interests and experience, and similar data regarding the family as well as friends.
