Do voters respond to welfare reforms? From a theoretical point of view they should, given that the welfare state constitutes one of the greatest mechanisms of redistribution of material wealth in society today. Yet, the answer from the literature is quite mixed: while anecdotal evidence suggests that governments sometimes are punished for government cutbacks, existing quantitative studies indicate that most of the time governments are not punished for cutbacks – and often they are even rewarded.
There are two shortciomings of the existing research. First of all, it only looks at changes from one election to the next. That is a very long period in which reform effects could be diluted. Second, existing studies do not use measure of actual reforms. We mend both of these problems by collecting a unique data set of welfare state reforms in Britain, Denmark and Germany from the 1970s to 2014 and yearly opinion polls covering the same period. With the new dataset we are able to answer three questions that so far have been unanswered: (1) Is there any effect at all of welfare reforms on government support? (2) Are there different effects depending on whether governments cutback or raise benefits? (3) Do the effects vary over time?
AUTHORS: Carsten Jensen, Seonghui Lee, Christoph Arndt, Georg Wenzelburger
