ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to assess the extent to which attitudes towards state-organized welfare are, or are not, converging across twenty-two of the societies covered by the ISSP Role of Government modules I–IV, fielded in 1985, 1990, 1996 and 2006. The results show that public support for the welfare state is converging across societies. Attitude change is slow but can be of considerable size over time. Attitudinal convergence does not work uniformly across welfare programs. The societies experiencing increased welfare-state support over time are mainly fueled by rising popular demands for state-led income redistribution. In the societies where the welfare state has gradually lost public support, the development is primarily caused by a growing population that does not believe that unemployment policy is a vital part of state responsibility. For some welfare policies – support for the elderly and for healthcare – public support is solid and stable over time across nearly all societies. Among advanced industrial economies, attitude change is more common in societies traveling on the market-oriented liberal welfare-state path than in societies with a European type of welfare state.
The issue of whether societies are likely to converge over time has attracted interest in various fields of the social sciences. While most efforts, both theoretical and empirical, have been dedicated to the study of structural convergence (Kerr et al. 1962; Inkeles 1998; Jones 1997; Firebaugh 2000; Wilensky 2002; Marsh 2007), the question of whether cultural (values, lifestyles, behaviors) convergence is taking place is certainly no less interesting (Inglehart 1997; Ester et al. 1994).
Within comparative social stratification research (e.g. explanations behind and outcomes of labor-market and welfare-institutional characteristics), the major reason why over-time developments of structural conditions rather than socio-cultural ones have attracted scholarly interest is the lack of internationally comparable trend data on attitudes covering issues relevant for social stratification research.
Viewed against this backdrop, the ISSP Role of Government modules are a truly unique data source; never before has a dataset on attitudes towards the 126welfare state, covering such a wide array of societies over such a long period of time, been available for the research community. This chapter attempts to assess the extent to which attitudes towards state-organized welfare are, or are not, converging across twenty-two of the societies covered by the ISSP. For some societies, time-series data covering two decades are available.
It should immediately be pointed out that arguments suggesting attitudinal convergence across industrial societies are not very common. With reference to the empirical findings and theoretical arguments provided by scholars within the political-institutionalism framework – one of the most influential approaches to the comparative study of welfare-state development – predictions point rather towards scenarios of attitudinal stability or further divergence than towards attitudinal convergence. Arguments in favor of convergence are principally based on the belief that structural convergence in the spheres of labor-market structures, education, family formation, and demography suggest that the social risks citizens face are also converging. Whether or not these trends are manifested in attitudinal convergence towards state-organized welfare depends on whether converging risk profiles lead to similar political demands for social protection across societies.
The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section, the theoretical underpinnings of arguments about attitudinal convergence are described. Thereafter, the research questions, the data and the variables are presented. This is followed by the empirical part. In the penultimate section, the results are summarized and discussed. The chapter ends with a concluding section.
