Welfare state and Great recession: Changes in attitudes towards welfare state in post-communist countries and the rest of Europe
Abstract
This paper analyses citizens' attitudes towards the welfare state and poses a question about whether public attitudes towards welfare state were influenced by the financial crisis. Its focus is on European countries and in particular on the differences between eastern and western European countries.
The paper examines three distinct research questions. Firstly, which individual-level and country-level variables are key determinants of support for income redistribution? Secondly, have Europeans reacted to the changing economic context uniformly, or do the directions of change vary? Thirdly, is there a difference in welfare state attitudes between post-communist European countries and the rest of Europe? Specifically, the authors of this paper focus on attitudes toward income redistribution.
The attitudes are measured on the individual and country level, the specific variables are chosen on the basis of previous scientific research, and they include important predictors such as social class, values, individual risk perception at the individual level, and GDP, or unemployment at the country level. The paper employes data from Eurostat and the European Social Survey (data from 2008 and 2016, i.e.
ESS4 and ESS8 rounds). The nature of the ESS data allows for multilevel regression analysis - both cross-country and longitudinal analysis.
Authors also extend the analysis to more ESS rounds to ensure the pre- and post-recession attitudes are robustly measured. The preliminary results show that there are indeed different attitudes towards redistribution in the post-communist countries and the rest of Europe.
However, the differences seem to be decreasing over time. Moreover, the Great Recession appears to have an important influence on the attitudes towards welfare state as well.