In Europe, with the new financial crisis and globalization of labour markets, unemployment is on the rise again. Consequently, redistributive questions about the social protection of unemployed people revive and welfare reform measures are called for (European Council, Joint Employment Report 2008/9). Evidently, international differences in the size of the unemployment problem and existing institutional designs set country-specific goals and boundaries for policy reform. But apart from socio-economic and institutional conditions, policy makers also operate in a cultural context as manifested in public attitudes towards the welfare deservingness of unemployed. Yet, while there is ample comparative information on the employment related socio-economic and institutional conditions of European countries, there is no information readily available about the relevant cultural contexts. This paper aims to contribute to this kind of information by analyzing popular perceptions of the deservingness of unemployed people. More specifically, we try to find out whether cross-country differences in deservingness of the unemployed can be explained by means of socio-economic, institutional and/or cultural contexts.
For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Social Survey 2008. This rich data set, containing a complete module on welfare attitudes, makes it possible to study deservingness of the unemployed across a wide variety of European countries (including various countries from Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has been largely neglected in the literature so far). Deservingness perceptions are operationalized by means of an item questioning to what extent the government is responsible for the standard of living of the unemployed (scale ranging from 0-10). In order to study the context specificity of individual deservingness perceptions, multilevel modeling is applied.
