The welfare state under strain: A comparative study of diversity, austerity and public opinion

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Our objective is to improve understanding of the changing determinants of public opinion towards welfare state institutions and policies in European societies in response to the pressures of diversity and economic austerity. We aim to answer four key questions:(i) What is the impact of diversity on welfare attitudes, and how are these influenced by national context?(ii) What is the impact of austerity on welfare attitudes, and how do these effects interact with the effects of diversity? How are these effects mediated by national context?(iii) How do public attitudes to welfare change over time, and what role do political messages and messengers play in driving this change? How are these changes and effects mediated by national context?(iv) To what extent are the effects of diversity and austerity, and their interaction, moderated by voters' political ideologies, values and partisan attachments? What role does national context play in influencing these complex patterns of interaction? To answer these questions, we plan to conduct a 30 month, five wave comparative panel study in Britain and the Netherlands. The panel will feature a series of embedded survey experiments designed to test the impact of diversity, austerity, and various moderators on political attitudes. The experiments will be designed to mimic media and campaign content concerning welfare policies, realistically reflecting the kind of material voters are exposed to when assessing policies. Identical experiments will be conducted simultaneously in the two countries, which will enable us for the first time to examine how national context mediates the effects of these factors on public opinion. We will also capture attitude change over time by surveying the same voters repeatedly, and we will examine the impact of the most powerful source of political information - election campaigns - by timing these repeated survey waves before and immediately after European Parliament and national elections. The data generated by the project will be made publicly available and will provide a valuable resource to the research community: comparative panel surveys are rare, and to our knowledge none has ever incorporated simultaneous comparative embedded experiments in the manner we propose.