Support for the Affluent Welfare State

• Goerres, Achim; Kumlin, Staffan & Karlsen, Rune (2019). Pressure without Pain: What Politicians (Don’t) Tell You about Welfare State Change. Journal of Social Policy. 48(4), p. 861–884. doi: 10.1017/S0047279419000138. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How do political leaders politicise welfare state “reform pressures”, e.g. unemployment, ageing or globalisation, in election campaigns? Competing expectations range from no politicization at all to a clear and unbiased coupling between pressures and intended policy responses. Eighteen speeches held by prime ministerial candidates at election-year party congresses in Germany, Norway and Sweden (2000–2010) reveal an unfinished and biased problem-solution coupling. On the one hand, even in these affluent countries pressures are frequently politicised. On the other hand, leaders either cherry-pick less painful policy solutions, or refrain altogether from debating them. So, while citizens learn that the welfare state is pressured, they are not exposed to the full range of policies they increasingly have reason to expect after elections.

• Fladmoe, Audun & Steen-Johnsen, Kari (2018). Is ethnic diversity bad for any dimension of social capital? Trust, networks, and voluntarism in Norwegian communities. Scandinavian Political Studies. 41(3), p. 336–366. doi: 10.1111/1467-9477.12127. Full text in Research Archive
• Goerres, Achim; Karlsen, Rune & Kumlin, Staffan (2018). What Makes People Worry about the Welfare State? A Three-Country Experiment. British Journal of Political Science. 50(4), p. 1519–1537. doi: 10.1017/S0007123418000224. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Welfare states are exposed to a host of cost-inducing ‘reform pressures’. An experiment implemented in Germany, Norway and Sweden tests how various reform pressure frames affect perceptions about the future financial sustainability of the welfare state. Such perceptions have been shown to moderate electoral punishment for welfare reform, but little is known about their origins. Hypotheses are formulated in dialogue with newer research on welfare state change, as well as with older theory expecting more stability in policy and attitudes (the ‘new politics’ framework). Research drawing on ‘deservingness theory’ is also consulted. The results suggest large variations in impact across treatments. The most influential path to effective pressure framing is to ‘zoom in’ on specific economic pressures linked to undeserving groups (above all immigration, but also to some extent low employment). Conversely, a message emphasizing pressure linked to a very deserving group (population aging) had little effect. A second conceivable path to pressure framing entails ‘zooming out’ – making messages span a diverse and more broadly threatening set of challenges. This possibility, however, received weaker support.

• Kumlin, Staffan; Wollebæk, Dag; Fladmoe, Audun & Steen-Johnsen, Kari (2017). Leap of Faith or Judgment of Deservingness? Generalized Trust, Trust in Immigrants and Support for the Welfare State. In Oorschot, Wim van; Roosma, Femke; Meuleman, Bart & Reeskens, Tim (Ed.), The Social Legitimacy of Targeted Welfare: Attitudes to welfare Deservingness. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 281–296. doi: 10.4337/9781785367212.00031.
• Lindén, Tord Skogedal; Fladmoe, Audun & Christensen, Dag Arne (2017). Does the Type of Service Provider Affect User Satisfaction? Public, For-Profit and Nonprofit Kindergartens, Schools and Nursing Homes in Norway. In Sivesind, Karl Henrik & Saglie, Jo (Ed.), Promoting Active Citizenship : Markets and Choice in Scandinavian Welfare. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 261–284. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-55381-8_7. Show summary

  Does the type of service provider affect user satisfaction? This chapter compares public, for-profit and nonprofit kindergartens, schools and nursing homes in Norway based on recent survey data. Our data allow us to identify respondents with actual experience with specific services and to distinguish between different welfare providers. We found that user satisfaction with private schools and kindergartens is higher than with corresponding public providers. Similarly, for-profit kindergartens enjoy slightly higher levels of user satisfaction than nonprofit providers. In sum, however, differences in user satisfaction are small, and given an overall high level of satisfaction, one should be careful placing too much emphasis on variations between different providers of welfare services in Norway.

• Jakobsson, Lars Niklas & Kumlin, Staffan (2017). Election Campaign Agendas, Government Partisanship, and the Welfare State. European Political Science Review. 9(2 (May)), p. 183–208. doi: 10.1017/S175577391500034X. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Although theoretically contentious, most empirical studies contend that electoral-political factors structure the welfare state. In practice, most studies concentrate on ‘government partisanship’, that is the ideological character of the government. We agree that politics matters but also seek to expand our understanding of what ‘politics’ should be taken to mean. Drawing on recent comparative research on agenda-setting, we study the impact of whether welfare state issues were broadly salient in the public sphere during the election campaign that produced the government. We formulate hypotheses about how such systemic campaign salience and government partisanship (separately and interactively) affect welfare generosity. We also consider how such effects might have changed, taking into account challenges to standard assumptions of representative democracy coming from the ‘new politics of the welfare state’ framework. We combine well-known, but updated, data on welfare state generosity and government partisanship, with original contextual data on campaign salience from 16 West European countries for the years 1980–2008. We find that campaigns matter but also that their impact has changed. During the first half of the examined period (the 1980s and early 1990s), it mainly served to facilitate government partisanship effects on the welfare state. More recently, big-time campaign attention to welfare state issues results in some retrenchment (almost) regardless of who forms the postelection government. This raises concerns about the democratic status of the politics of welfare state reform in Europe.

• Lundåsen, Susanne Wallman & Wollebæk, Dag (2013). Diversity and Community Trust in Swedish Local Communities. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. 23(3), p. 299–321. doi: 10.1080/17457289.2013.808201. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article analyses the effect of immigration-related diversity on different forms of trust through the hierarchical analysis of three levels of approximately 5,000 respondents nested in over 800 neighbourhoods and 33 municipalities. The data set is based on a unique survey that was specially designed to measure different forms of trust and to test the effects of context. Building on previous findings about the effect of diversity on various forms of trust in Sweden, we discuss three mechanisms through which diversity may drive down community trust in diverse settings – dissimilarity, perceptions of unfairness and asymmetry of information and norms – and explore these empirically. In particular, we examine under which conditions asymmetry of information and norms and perceptions of unfairness affect community trust, and how it interacts with diversity. Our analysis reveals that norm asymmetry and perceptions of unfairness affect community trust negatively but the negative effects are more pronounced in the most diverse local communities.

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• Fladmoe, Audun & Steen-Johnsen, Kari (2016). Ethnic diversity and different dimensions of social capital in a Nordic context.

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