ABSTRACT
One of the most striking facts of recent Spanish political debate has been the relatively little partisan and ideological conflict over the size of the welfare state. To explain this puzzle, we rely on the idea that support for the welfare state and support for redistribution are not necessarily the same thing. Our analysis of welfare policy preferences in Spain reveals that a significant proportion of Spaniards favour welfare state expansion along with non-redistributive programmes, and welfare state retrenchment along with pro-poor policies, and that partisanship is only barely related to these combinations of 'non-standard' policy preferences.
