6 Dec
2022
Support for Redistribution vs. Political trust: How Material Circumstances Make These Two Types of Welfare State Support Mutually Exclusive
Support for welfare system is conventionally measured by two different concepts. One focuses on people’s approval of redistribution principles and aims to capture citizens’ acceptance of a welfare state arrangement or some of its constitutive parts (i.e., specific welfare programs). Second option is more general and captures to what degree citizens trust the institutions and their main representatives. Both concepts – support for redistribution and political trust – inspired two broad streams of literature and thus it is surprising that the research has brought them together only to conclude that they have little in common (Svallfors 2002). This paper argues otherwise and proposes a theoretical argument that material circumstances constitute the common denominator impacting two distinctive supports for welfare system in a mutually exclusive way. As people are becoming wealthier, they are decreasingly willing to share their “well-deserved” resources, while their political trust increases possibly because they believe that the current political representation contributed to the improvement in their lives. On the other hand, as people are getting poorer, they tend to blame, and hence distrust the government, while their support for redistribution rises because it improves their own situation. This theoretical proposition is supported via several empirical tests. First, the very existence of these two opposite tendencies across various political systems is demonstrated via the cross-sectional European Social Survey data. Second, the internal validity of the role of material circumstances in people’s political trust and redistribution preferences is supported via analyses utilizing three wave panel surveys conducted in Norway and Germany. These findings advance our understanding of the role of material circumstances in peoples support for welfare systems—most importantly, they imply that welfare systems can enjoy only one kind of support within the same individuals.
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