Welfare Attitudes in a Changing Europe (WAE)

• Applicant: Professor Steffen Mau, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2008 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 77084317

The project aims to set up a comprehensive research programme on citizens’ attitudes towardswelfare policies across European countries. Our research will focus on the interactions betweenindividual welfare attitudes and behaviour, institutional contexts and structural variables. The project isexpected to provide essential input to the interdisciplinary field of comparative studies of welfare stateattitudes and to offer critical insights for the public legitimacy of welfare state reform. The project ismainly, but by no means exclusively, based on data from a new module for the European SocialSurvey 2008, Welfare Attitudes in a Changing Europe. The data provided by this new module willmake possible rigorous cross-national and multi-level analyses of the impact of structural andinstitutional variation on attitudes towards welfare provision and its’ financing. The main dependentvariables in our conceptual model are welfare attitudes, composed of orientations towards (a) welfarestate scope and responsibilities; (b) collective financing; (c) different models of welfare; (d) servicedelivery; and (e) the target groups and receivers of welfare. Another set of dependent variablesconcerns evaluations of the welfare state, for example in terms of (a) the task performance of thewelfare state; (b) the economic consequences of welfare policies; and (c) the moral and socialconsequences of welfare policies. The model explains these welfare attitudes as a function of a set ofpredispositions including interpersonal and institutional trust, risk and threat perceptions, beliefs aboutwelfare policies, social values, and personal experiences. At the individual level, these predispositions,in turn, are expected to vary as a function of the risks and resources individuals and groups aredifferentially exposed to and endowed with. At the contextual (country) level, the predispositions arehypothesised to vary mainly as a function of (a) institutional settings, in particular those related to theprogrammatic and territorial structure of the welfare state, and those related to the connection of work,family and welfare policies; (b) the composition and power resources of different claimant groups andpolitical actors; (c) the prevailing discourse on social policy matters in different countries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants