Support for the Affluent Welfare State: Interests, Fairness, and Social Capital in Context

The project has a large number of publications. Four of these can be mentioned here to convey a number of key results. One uses the project's Norwegian panel data (TnS Gallup), together with similar data collected in Sweden and Germany, to examine if citizens perceptions of welfare state sustainability change when they are exposed to information about cost-inducing pressures on the welfare state. Using an experimental design, we examine whether views on the viability of the welfare state are susceptible to an argumentative emphasis on reform pressures, including population ageing, low employment rates, immigration, and international economic crisis. The analysis is sensitive to whether effects are contingent on prior attitudes and interests. Our three-country comparative design makes it possible to investigate if effects on perceptions of sustainability are different in oil rich Norway than in the more pressured contexts of Germany and Sweden. Overall however, we find that while Norwegians are more optimistic about welfare state sustainability than Germans and Swedes, Norwegians are also particularly susceptible to information about reform pressures. Importantly, such effects are mainly restricted to treatments related to different types of immigration. A second study examines whether political leaders in Norway, Sweden, and Germany put welfare state "reform pressures" such as mass unemployment or population ageing, on the public sphere agenda in election campaigns? If so, which ones, and to what extent? Do politicians couple pressures with related policy measures, such as retrenchment, cost containment, social investment, defence of status quo, and expansion? We analyse speeches held by prime ministerial candidates of the two biggest parties at the party congresses before national elections in Germany, Norway and Sweden (2000-2010). We find that even in these three affluent and comparatively sustainable welfare states reform pressures are put on the public sphere agenda by party leaders. However, leaders concentrate on more popular, less painful, policy solutions and aspects of ongoing welfare state reform. Alternatively, they refrain altogether from connecting pressures with policy. Thus, citizens may not be exposed to the full range of policies they can now expect after elections. The importance of immigration and ethnic diversity as a perceived reform pressure in the Norwegian welfare state is explored further in two further papers from the project. A forthcoming book chapter pits two storylines against each other. The more pessimistic one is that immigration-driven diversity undermines welfare state support because citizens have differentiated trust and deservingness views of immigrants, from which they draw policy conclusions as the composition of the population changes. The second, more upbeat, view assigns causal primacy to generalized trust and the idea that trusters take ?a leap of faith? in crucial respects. Generalized trust would then shape more group-specific views, producing a generalized belief system about ?most other people;? as well as bolster welfare state support. The results are mostly consistent with the more pessimistic view. Trust in 'most people' does not necessarily extend to immigrants. Moreover, the positive relationship between generalized trust and welfare support hinges mainly on the smaller subset of 'true universalists' among generalized trusters, for whom trust in most people also includes immigrants. The latter kind of trust is at a much lower level than the impressive number of Norwegians who say they trust ?most people.? Finally, immigrant-specific perceptions of deservingness-inducing behavior are more important for three out of four dimensions of welfare state support. The fourth study notes that research on the relationship between diversity and social capital/trust have been far from uniform. different studies have used different measures of social capital and because few studies have differentiated between respondents with different (immigrant) backgrounds. In this study we move beyond the question of whether ethnic diversity is related to social capital and ask which dimensions of social capital are related to ethnic diversity. Analyzing primary Norwegian data, we use nine different measures to explore three dimensions of social capital in 61 communities. The results suggest that ethnic diversity is negatively associated with spatially bounded forms of social trust to some extent with traditional forms of voluntarism. Importantly, ethnic diversity is unrelated to generalized social trust and social networks.

We analyze the attitudes and behavior on which the modern welfare state rests. Such support is studied broadly, including how people define their economic interests, how they perceive the fairness of procedures and outcomes, and whether they trust and interact with fellow citizens in civil society. The overriding question is how orientations are affected by local and national context. We analyze effects of local variation in Norway, but also compare a large number of European countries with each other. Four groups of contextual factors are considered: (1) public and private affluence, (2) the level and structure of economic inequality, (3) variations in ethnic heterogeneity, and (4) variations in the mass mediated public sphere. We make important contributions to research on citizens in context. We simultaneously consider a broader range of attitudes and behavior than much research. We jointly consider several groups of contextual factors, analyzing how they work in combination. We unite studies of national and local context under one framework. Finally, we systematically include the public sphere as a source of contextual variation, focusing on how agenda-setting and framing at the elite level affect citizens in combination with external conditions. We conduct a citizen survey in Norwegian municipalities with a panel design (waves in 2013-15) and a stratified sample. This survey measures all key concepts and can be matched with unique contextual data. The design allows separation of self-selection processes from genuine contextual causal impact. It also allows analysis of dynamic contextual changes. Moreover, we study election campaigns in eight countries asking how important issues of the welfare state have been framed in the public sphere by political actors. The impact of such variation is studied in randomized experiments in Norway, Sweden and Germany. This allows studies of how "agenda-setting" and "framing" interacts with contextual conditions.