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Sophie’s Choice: Social Attitudes to Welfare State Retrenchment in Bailed-Out
Portugal
Filipe Carreira da Silva
1
and Laura Valadez-Martinez
2
Abstract
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), 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 Portugal,
namely its politically contested character.
Keywords
Welfare attitudes; social rights; social rights consciousness; welfare regimes; dualization;
Portugal
1 University of Cambridge, fcs23@cam.ac.uk
2 Loughborough University, L.J.Valadez@Lboro.ac.uk
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1. Introduction
In times of austerity, welfare states are often called into question. The current era of austerity
in Europe is no exception. Especially since 2009, there has been a heated debate involving
governments, policy-makers, and the public at large on the future of the welfare state in
Europe. Political debate and decision-making benefit from detailed and up-dated knowledge
concerning people’s preferences. Hence the main question of this paper: What are people’s
welfare preferences in a context of economic crisis and austerity? This question is important
for at least two reasons. First, income redistribution by the government is a central feature of
all industrialized countries. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly since
the Second World War, political and economic modernization entailed a dramatic expansion
of public social welfare programmes, that is, the fundamental instrument of income
redistribution by the government alongside fiscal policies. Second, political conflicts over
redistribution, already one of the most contested issues in democracies, tend to become more
acute in times of austerity. In crisis-ridden Europe, most political debates, at the national and
supra-national levels, revolve around income redistribution trade-offs. This is especially the
case in southern European countries such as Greece and Portugal, where such trade-offs have
become all the more obvious as austerity policies imposed by international lenders made
social expenditure a preferred target, including pension reforms, unemployment subsidies,
and health care benefits. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the general public’s
preferences regarding welfare provision seem amenable to change in difficult times (e.g.
Ervasti et al. 2012; Fridberg 2012). Experiencing the worst economic crisis in a generation
while being forced by international lenders to implement unprecedented welfare retrenchment
programmes, Greece and Portugal provide excellent case studies with which to study
evolving attitudes towards welfare.
This paper focuses upon Portugal, which requested international financial assistance
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in April 2011 from a troika of organizations including the European Commission, the
European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Portugal provides an ideal case
study for testing the resilience of universalistic understandings of welfare provision. This
paper offers an analysis of the distribution of social attitudes towards the welfare state in
Portugal, two years into the implementation of the austerity programme imposed by
international lenders. The democratic Portuguese welfare state was erected according to
strictly universalistic terms and it has never been seriously contested by neoliberal ideas. The
troika’s intervention marks the first attempt to restructure the Portuguese welfare state
according to non-universalistic principles.
Portugal inaugurated the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century
with the Carnations Revolution of April 25, 1974 (Huntington 1991). The new democracy
defined itself in terms of a break with the Estado Novo, a corporativist dictatorship created in
1933, and oriented towards European social democratic and socialist models. This is
particularly obvious as regards public social provision. The Portuguese Constitution of 1975
contains what is still the longest and most detailed section on social rights in the world (Ben-
Bassat and Dahan 2008), with a strong emphasis upon principles of generality, gratuity,
decentralization, and universalism. Social rights were no longer to be conceived as
prerogatives of certain occupational groups, but as citizenship entitlements to be enjoyed by
all citizens. These constitutional promises had institutional implications. The democratic
welfare state was implemented in broadly universalistic terms, with universal public systems
in the domains of health care, social security, and education (Vieira and Silva 2010; 2013).
As in other southern European countries, however, such universalistic promises conflict with
the high degree of fragmentation, familialism, and persistent gaps in social provision that
characterize the Portuguese welfare state (Ferrera 1996, 1997; Mingione 2001; Rhodes 1997;
Trifiletti 1999; Karamessini 2008). The Portuguese welfare state can thus be described as
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belonging to a southern European sub-type of the Continental state-corporatist model, in
which universalistic elements predominate despite the persistence of clientelist and
corporatist elements leading to fragmentation (Guibentif 1996; see also Leibfried 1993 on a
Latin-Rim welfare model). The existing survey-based literature on Portuguese welfare
attitudes lends support to this description (Cabral 1997). Briefly, this is the background
against which the first attempt at the systematic restructuring of the Portuguese welfare state
along non-universalist principles, embodied in the May 2011 Memorandum of Understanding
on Specific Economic Conditionality between the Portuguese government and the troika of
international lenders, was signed.
This study utilizes individual-level data from a survey applied to a representative
sample of the Portuguese adult population in the spring of 2013 to explore attitudes in a
context of welfare cuts resulting from the troika’s intervention. The dependent variable is the
opinion on which social rights should be universally guaranteed in a context of austerity. The
main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference-formation regarding public
social provision. According to the first logic, if one considers that social rights are inherent in
human nature and core components of citizenship, one would favour a universalistic view in
which everybody deserves access to social rights, irrespective of the level of individual
contribution. In broad terms, this is the understanding enshrined in the Portuguese
Constitution, consistently upheld by the Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence since 1982, and
which inspired the establishment of a universalistic social protection system, including a
National Health Service primarily financed by taxation. According to the second logic, if one
is aware that social rights imply obligations, one may favour a targeted view in which the
enjoyment of social rights is based upon the extent of one’s individual contribution and need.
This logic inspired the old dictatorial regime’s social provision schemes, defined largely in
corporatist terms, which, albeit with important differences, can also be found in the troika’s
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policy preferences. In this paper, we explore both logics to explain individual-level support
for the public provision of education, health care, social security, and housing in a context
marked by fiscal austerity and the (historically unprecedented) political questioning of the
universalist character of public social provision.
The article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the hypotheses and positions
them amid the literature of welfare preferences: the dualization hypothesis (H1), the regime
hypothesis (H2), and the social rights consciousness hypothesis (H3). In section 3, we discuss
the data collection and the selection of variables, and present the regression models mobilized
to test the hypotheses. In section 4, we examine the results of the regression analyses and
discuss these findings by reference to the literature. We conclude with an overview of our
findings and suggestions for future research.
