Welfare Regimes and Attitudes Towards Redistribution: The Regime Hypothesis Revisited

This paper addresses the issue of why comparative research on welfare state attitudes has failed to establish a link between welfare regimes and popular support for redistribution. Several limitations in the existing literature regarding the dependent variable, the opera-tionalisation of welfare regimes, how the relationship between regimes and attitudes is identified, and the methods used are proposed as reasons why no link between regimes and attitudes has been found. An alternative approach is developed in which welfare regimes are operationalised using a range of theoretically defining characteristics, e.g. total public social spending, benefit generosity, and the weight of social services relative to total public social expenditure. Using data on 13 Western European countries from the first two waves of the European Social Survey, the empirical analysis provides mixed support for the hypothesized relationship between welfare regimes and support for redistribution. Several suggestions for future research are also discussed.