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Public opinion towards welfare state reform: The role of political trust and government satisfaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2026

Julian L. Garritzmann*
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Erik Neimanns
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany
Marius R. Busemeyer
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Julian L. Garritzmann, Goethe University Frankfurt, PEG Gebäude, Theodor-W.-Adorno Platz 6, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Email: Garritzmann@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
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Abstract

The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post-industrial knowledge economies. Experts and policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a ‘social investment’ model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what conditions are citizens willing to accept such future-oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hitherto neglected role of citizens’ trust in and satisfaction with government. Trust and satisfaction matter because future-oriented reforms generate uncertainties, risks and costs, which trust and government satisfaction can attenuate. We offer micro-level causal evidence using experiments in a representative survey covering eight European countries and confirm these findings with European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We find that trust and government satisfaction increase reform support and moderate the effects of self-interest and ideological standpoints. These findings have crucial implications not least because they help explain why some countries manage – but others fail – to enact important reforms.

Information

Type
Research Articles
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Authors. European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research
Figure 0

Figure 1. Direct effects of government satisfaction on attitudes towards 10 different reform scenarios. Notes: Average marginal effects and 95 per cent-confidence intervals. Multilevel random country-intercept logistic regressions, maximum likelihood estimations.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Interaction effects between government satisfaction and materialistic costs (left side) and ideological costs (right side). Notes: Predicted probabilities and 95 per cent-confidence intervals, based on Table 1, Models 4 and 5. Density plots (in light grey) show the distribution of observations.

Figure 2

Table 1. Support for welfare reforms in policy trade-offs

Figure 3

Table 2. Average marginal effects of political trust on support for welfare state reforms, ESS data

Figure 4

Figure 3. Countries’ average level of government satisfaction and their level of social investment effort (2014). Notes: SOCIAL INVESTMENT EFFORT is countries’ social investment spending (in constant prices), standardized and deflated by the number of beneficiaries in the respective target populations (Ronchi, 2016). GOVERNMENT SATISFACTION is the country-mean of government satisfaction using ESS wave 8 (including survey weights). The figure looks highly similar when using other measures of political trust.

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