Research on public opinion regarding the welfare state has come a long way since the 1970s. As Stefan Svallfors observes in his introduction to this volume, early studies were limited to rough comparisons based on questions from separate national surveys. More recently, researchers have been able to draw on the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Programme, among others, which provide comparable data from a large number of nations. Valuable as they are, these surveys include only a few general questions about the responsibilities of government.
Contested Welfare States reports on a new survey, the European Social Survey (ESS) module on welfare attitudes (2008), which includes a range of questions about particular welfare services. For example, the module contains questions on whether governments should be responsible for providing jobs, health care for the sick, a reasonable standard of living for old people and the unemployed, child-care services, and paid leave for people who need to care for family members. It also includes questions about perceptions of the welfare state—for example, whether it puts a strain on the economy or makes people lazy. The ESS module covers most nations in Europe (Italy is the most important exception) plus Israel. This volume includes six empirical studies based on the ESS module, with introductory and concluding chapters by Svallfors.
The empirical chapters cover a range of topics: the relationship between welfare state performance and popular support for the welfare state; support for the welfare state among people who see themselves as facing a high risk of sickness, job loss, or other negative events; the relation between normative beliefs and welfare attitudes; influences on views about providing welfare services to immigrants; national differences in the relationship of age and class to welfare attitudes; and a comparison to the United States based on an American survey that includes many questions from the ESS module. All of the studies are quantitative, and most use multilevel analysis to incorporate both individual and national differences.
One general theme that emerges from the chapters is that differences in attitudes toward the welfare state cannot plausibly be reduced to self-interest but are influenced by normative beliefs. Some of the results about the nature of the relationship are surprising; for example, authoritarianism and low trust in people are associated with support for an extensive government role in providing welfare services. A second theme is that there is solid support for the welfare state in most nations, despite the economic crisis and increased immigration. A third theme is that many national differences do not have a clear relationship to factors like per capita GDP or the level of government expenditures. This does not mean that no generalizations are possible: Svallfors, Joakim Kullin, and Annette Schabel find that social class and age influence attitudes toward welfare policies in almost all nations. However, there are substantial differences in the size of these effects, most of which cannot be accounted for by the national-level variables they use in their analysis.
All of the analyses are well done, but the book amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The primary message seems to be that things are complicated and that accounts such as Gøsta Esping-Andersen's influential Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) are oversimplified. Of course, reality is often complex, and the lack of clear conclusions may just reflect that complexity. However, it may also result from certain analytical decisions that guided this work. As Svallfors (p. 15) notes in his introduction, the authors are “more concerned with comparing relations and associations than with comparing levels.” Although he is certainly correct in saying that “great caution is needed when comparing levels of attitudes across countries” (p. 14), questions about levels are still of primary interest to most observers. Given the care that went into the design and collection of the ESS module, it seems that these data could shed some light on national differences in levels of support for the welfare state. In fact, several of the authors do discuss these differences, but not systematically. The relative neglect of this point is a major missed opportunity.
Another concern is that when considering relations and associations, the authors rely heavily on multilevel models, rather than taking the more inductive approach of looking at national-level estimates and trying to discover patterns. By and large, nations are simply treated as “cases”: There is little discussion of national differences in welfare systems or historical experiences. The chapters are concerned with testing discrete hypotheses, rather than proposing a general account of national differences.
Svallfors says in the introduction that “the field is now ‘data-rich’ but advanced analyses, explanations, and interpretations lag behind” (p. 5). Contested Welfare States makes a substantial contribution to the stock of advanced analyses, but a smaller one in terms of explanations and interpretations. It will be valuable to researchers studying public opinion toward the welfare state, but will be of limited interest to a general audience.
