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

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.

We expect a high level of interest in our research findings from policymakers, stakeholders and the wider public. The welfare state is one of the central institutions in modern Western democracies at present, and the strains it faces in an era of rising diversity and economic austerity make questions about public support for the maintenance or reform of central welfare policies highly salient.

The beneficiaries of this research will include national and local government policymakers working in departments dealing with welfare and welfare reform, including (inter alia) the Department of Work and Pensions, the Department of Communities and Local Government and the Department for Education, as well as a range of charities, trade unions think tanks and NGOs interested in issues of poverty and welfare reform, for example the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Centre for Social Justice. A key focus of the research will be the impact of diversity, including discrimination against ethnic minority or immigrant welfare recipients, which will be of key interest to the Government Equalities Office and key stakeholders working on equality issues such as the Runneymede Trust and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Our aim will be to disseminate key findings to a broad non-academic audience. Dissemination to non academic users will proceed through three channels. Firstly, a project website will be created and updated by the core research team. These will include blogs and plain language briefings detailing some of the key emerging findings from the research. Secondly, briefings on key results relating to migration and diversity will be disseminated through the Migration Observatory at Oxford (MigObs), with the assistance of Project Associate Scott Blinder. The Migration Observatory is a highly respected website committed to disseminating key research and information on migration and diversity issues to a wide audience, which has built up a strong profile with media and policymakers interested in these issues with the assistance of Project Associate Scott Blinder. Thirdly, the core project team all have close links with think tanks and third sector organisations interested in diversity, poverty and public opinion. We will recruit suitable partners to organise joint events publicising and debating the key findings from our research with policymakers, journalists, and activists interested in the fields of diversity, welfare and austerity.

The chief benefit of our research to these stakeholders will be the provision of robust high quality data and analysis focussed on some of the key questions at the heart of debates over the welfare state. We will be able to provide those concerned about the impact of rising diversity on public attitudes towards welfare and its recipients with the best possible data on how welfare attitudes are influenced by factors such as the ethnicity and migration status of recipients. We will be able to provide those concerned about how changes in the way elites discuss welfare policies influence public views of welfare recipients with robust experimental evidence on what effect (if any) different elite "frames" have on welfare attitudes. We will be able to inform stakeholders on how evolving party positions and campaign messages, through two very different election campaigns, are influencing public views on the welfare state. And we will be able to provide a comparative overview of how these effects vary in two very different societies, providing insight into how Britain's institutions, values, and political parties, shape public views. These are a selection of examples of possible public debates our research will be able to contribute evidence towards, others will doubtless arise during the course of the project, as new issues and debates emerge to which we can bring our data to bear.