Speaker：Anders Lindbom [Uppsala University, Dept. of Political Science]

Date：January 15, 2024／16:00‐17:40 (JST)

Location：Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo

Language：English

Target : Open to ISS members only

Abstract：Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) had an enormous impact. Esping-Andersen - and in a more developed way, Korpi and Palme's "The Paradox of Redistribution" (1998) - argued that welfare states create self-reinforcing feedback.
However, 20-30 years of research on welfare state opinion produced inconclusive evidence and this research ran out of steam. The situation is not ideal: welfare regimes are still a dominant way of thinking in comparative welfare literature, but this dominance resembles a giant on feet of clay.
But despite the iconic status of the argument, essential parts of it have been misunderstood. Opinion research on welfare opinion often used "redistribution attitudes" as dependent variable when testing the theory. However, the use of this variable rests on a misinterpretation of the theory and it compromises the tests. The tests also suffer from the usual problems when using cross-country correlations to test causal relationships.
In this manuscript, survey-experiments are used to establish causal relationships. Evidence that increases of the maximum benefit leads to higher middle-class support for an encompassing type of welfare state is found in six experiments. These findings support the micro-level mechanism of the welfare regime-argument.