A Multilevel Analysis of Individuals' Attitudes Toward Welfare State Responsibilities

Making use of data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we investigate the determinants of individuals’ attitudes towards welfare state policies in 29 European countries. Socio-demographic characteristics, income, employment and health statuses, and an indicator of egalitarian values are used to explain two welfare state attitude dimensions inquired about in the ESS. Complementing the micro data from the survey with country-level indicators of the quality of government, we aim to shed light on the contextual determinants of the attitudes being examined. Our multilevel model estimates reveal that individual-level characteristics influence attitudes in predictable ways, but the impact of the quality of government and how it interacts with egalitarianism depends on the specific attitude being examined. While the impact of egalitarian values on the attitudes towards more taxation and social spending by the government is larger in higher quality-of-government countries, the opposite is the case with regard to the provision of more specific redistributive policies that benefit certain groups. We also find that the patterns of association between personal characteristics and welfare state attitudes observed on the subsample of Turkish respondents are different than those obtained on the combined data set. We attribute the observed differences to cultural factors, the relatively low government quality, and common misconceptions about the welfare state especially among the less educated segments of the Turkish society.