ABSTRACT
Introduction For decades, popular support for social protection policies has been the focus of numerous studies in social sciences and beyond. The scholarly interest has been further sparked by recent developments in Western countries, which came to be known as a widespread ‘retrenchment of the welfare state’. Against this general background, two focal questions are examined jointly in this chapter. The first, most general, question bears on the components of attitudes towards the welfare state. More specifically, this chapter is concerned with the antecedents of voting decisions, in the context of referendums on social protection measures in Switzerland (1996-2004). Drawing from the literature on welfare state attitudes, the determinants of voting decisions can be expected to vary depending on individual attributes such as normative orientations, cognitive skills, or utilitarian considerations. Long-term individual attributes will not be the focus of my investigation, though. Instead, special emphasis will be laid on the role of information in the formation of attitudes and voting decisions, and in particular on the role of information that derives from interpersonal communication. It is beyond dispute that much knowledge about ballot issues is acquired through information provided by political actors in referendum campaigns. However, a long-standing question of survey research has been to determine through which channels citizens collect information that they use in making their vote choices. At least since the seminal studies of US presidential elections in the 1940s, a dichotomy between media information and interpersonal information has been put forward in the literature. Questioning the conventional wisdom that ‘more than anything else people can move other people’ (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944: 158), some evidence has recently been accumulated in support of the thesis of ‘massive media effects’ (e.g. Zaller 1996). The available data on Swiss referendum votes do not allow me to pit these two hypotheses against one another. Rather, in keeping with recent research favouring the interactive aspects of media and interpersonal information, I will attempt to show whether and how
the two sources of influence can have conditional and reciprocal effects on one another (see also Morales in this volume). In a second step, the outlined mechanisms are investigated further by specifying the role of moderators in the processing of information. Communication research suggests that the impact of interpersonal and media sources is facilitated under certain circumstances, while it is inhibited in other cases. Indeed, contributions by Morales, Toka and Lup in this volume strongly point to the role of the political context in moderating the influence of media and interpersonal information. Likewise, I will investigate the role of contextual variables in moderating media and interpersonal influence on voting in Swiss referendums.
