Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy preferences predicts an increased polarisation in opinions towards the welfare state between different groups within society – in particular between labour market insiders and outsiders. However, the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualised country, Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal change, and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so.

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Waiting for Godot? : Welfare Attitudes in Portugal Before and After the Financial Crisis

This short paper focuses on understanding moral dilemmas, Artificial Moral Advisors, and their possible roles in ethical decision-making. After a brief analysis of the philosophical debate around dilemmas, we propose three different classes of dilemmas. We then discuss how AI-based advisors could be used to enhance human ethical decision-making, with a particular focus on three possible AI skills (identifying, presenting and settling dilemmas), as well as on their role as ethical experts. The resulting proposal opens up to new possible uses of AI moral advisors, and to the help they might offer in difficult decisions.

Artificial Moral Advisors: enhancing human ethical decision-making

This article examines social attitudes towards social rights in Portugal. It utilizes original survey data from 2013 to study the distribution of welfare attitudes in a context of economic austerity and welfare retrenchment. The main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference formation regarding public social provision: one is universalistic (or needs-based), and the other is contributory. These two logics frame choices concerning the future of the welfare state in Portugal. We explore the determinants of this choice through three hypotheses: dualization between insiders and outsiders (H1), the type of welfare regime (H2) and social rights consciousness (H3). Our findings suggest that choice between universalistic and contributory models is not impervious to macro-institutional factors and labour market performance. The paper's main contribution, however, is to empirically demonstrate that this choice is significantly shaped by pre-existing understandings of social rights in Por...

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Laura Josefina Valadez Martínez

Papers

Sophie's Choice: Social attitudes to welfare state retrenchment in bailed-out Portugal