Calendrier du 24 février 2017
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 24/02/2017 de 12:45 à 13:45
Campus Jourdan - Bâtiment E - Rez-de-Chausée-Salle E101
EPCI (Economie politique du changement institutionnel) Seminar
Du 24/02/2017 de 11:00 à 12:30
MSE-PARIS 1 - Salle S18
BUSEMEYER Marius (U. Konstanz, prof invité à U. Paris 1, CES)
Public Demand for Social Investment: New Supporting Coalitions for Welfare State Reform in Western Europe?
Social investment has become increasingly popular among policy-makers and welfare state scholars. Yet, the “social investment turn” currently remains a very elite-centered discourse, as the existing literature has mainly studied the politics of social investment on the macro-level, investigating the role of collective actors. Citizens’ preferences and public demands towards social investments, in contrast, have not been studied. This paper comparatively studies public opinion towards social investment and social compensation.
We analyze, firstly, whether citizens hold coherent preferences on social investment policies at all and how these relate to preferences towards compensatory social policies. We argue that respondents’ welfare state preferences cluster along two dimensions: a social-investment and a social compensation dimension. Secondly, we claim that social investment is much more popular among European citizens than social compensation. Finally, we hypothesize that the supporting coalitions between social compensation and social investment differ in important respects.
Empirically, we can draw on a new comparative, representative social survey, interviewing about 9,000 individuals in eight European countries. Going beyond the usual measure focusing on social spending, we surveyed respondents’ support for fictive, but realistic welfare state reform scenarios. Our results show that across Europe welfare policy preferences are indeed two-dimensional (with one important exception). Secondly, we find that social investments are very popular vis-à-vis social compensation. Finally, we show that and explain why the supporting coalitions of social compensation and social investment differ in fundamental ways with regard to the role of material self-interest and ideological positions.