The paper argues that welfare state policies regarding public sector services, labor market and pensions were and are used by political parties to build and stabilize political coalitions of social groups supporting them. The paper argues that the use of welfare state policies in this vein by major parties of the left and right, when in long term control of government, led to very different patterns of political divisions and attitudes toward welfare programs in European countries. The parties used policies to create coalitions of social groups with vested interest in the perpetuation of the existing policies, and consequently, parties who introduced them in power. The paper tests these propositions in a comparative multilevel analysis of European countries, combining individual level data on voting behavior and political attitudes as dependent variables, and measures of belonging to groups of welfare state producers or users with vested interest in the system, as well as macro-level measures of welfare state policies with respect to provision of services, labor market and pensions as independent variables. In this way, the paper seeks to explain divergence in structure of political alignments and attitudes across countries as well as divergence in attitudes of individual groups of welfare state producers and users across welfare regimes.
