1
Waiting for Godot?
Welfare Attitudes in Portugal Before and After the Financial Crisis
AUTHORS
Mónica Brito Vieira (York University)
Filipe Carreira da Silva (Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon;
Selwyn College, Cambridge)
Cícero Roberto Pereira (Universidade Federal da Paraíba)
Abstract
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 polarization 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 dualized 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.
Keywords
welfare state; welfare attitudes; 2008 financial crisis; Portugal; social rights
2
I. Introduction
Seven years on, most Europeans still grapple with the effects of the financial crisis of
2008: budget deficits and public debt, shrinking economies, insufficient job creation,
high unemployment, increased labour market vulnerability, and rising inequality.
Despite being widespread, these effects are stronger in some countries than in others.
Bailed-out Portugal has been one of Europe’s hardest hit nations. The implementation
of the austerity package brokered between the Portuguese government and the so-
called Troika – the three international organizations (the IMF, the European
Commission, and the European Central Bank) from which the country sought
financial assistance – implied various cutbacks and significant changes to social
benefits. These occurred as the Portuguese economy faced its worst downturn since
the mid-1970s, with unemployment and the risk of being atypically employed
reaching record levels, and demand for social welfare provision expanding at an equal
pace.
Taking Portugal as our case study, this article addresses a question that the literature
on welfare politics has barely begun to answer: whether welfare attitudes change in
times of hardship and how (see e.g. Taylor-Gooby, 2001). In particular, we want to
assess whether these changes translate themselves into a more differentiated public
opinion, with new cleavages arising between different categories of people, namely
labour market insiders and outsiders. Given the deep insider-outsider divisions known
to characterize the Portuguese labour force, and given how hard the crisis has hit the
country, Portugal should offer a critical case for theories about change and
polarisation of welfare attitudes during crises. In Eckstein’s original formulation,
critical cases can be “least” or “most” likely to confirm theoretical predictions
3
(Eckstein 1975). We argue Portugal is a most likely case since it is a case that many
scholars considering our theoretical claims would predict to achieve a certain outcome
and yet as we shall see it does not do so (Gerring 2007).
We start by drawing upon two main strands of theoretical explanations for change of
social attitudes toward welfare provision. The first centres on economic self-interest,
the second on the role of partisanship and ideology in determining welfare attitudes.
We test a set of predictions stemming from each of these accounts using novel data
from a survey carried out in early 2013, at the peak of the crisis. This replicated most
of the established 2008 module on welfare attitudes of the European Social Survey,
while it also included specific questions on what people think, say, and do about
social rights. This data allows us to test a third explanation, normally overlooked in
the literature: whether legal consciousness impacts preferences on welfare policy. In
particular, the legal consciousness of social rights (henceforth, “social rights
consciousness”) refers to a specific component of our value and belief system,
namely, the ways in which we conceive of our social entitlements, and how these
affect the ways in which we act with respect to them (Silva, 2013; see also Silva and
Valadez, 2015). Theoretically, this represents a fresh contribution to our
understanding of attitudinal variation and it comes justified by the fact that often, and
certainly in the case of Portugal, support for government welfare provision is framed
by a conception of social services and benefits as legal rights.
Our study shows that public opinion on the welfare state does change in hard times.
However, the ways in which it changes are not always consistent with the predictions
4
in the literature. This double-edged finding can be disaggregated into three more
specific results.
First, as expected, support for state intervention in welfare provision increased in the
aftermath of the crisis. This generalized increase in support was accompanied with,
but not explained by, a general ideological shit of the population to the left. However,
it did not translate itself into a willingness to pay taxes to sustain the extension of the
provision. Both of these findings are true for outsiders and insiders. But there are
some differences: whereas the lack of support for an increase in taxation cuts equally
across groups, outsiderness accentuates support for increased provision, which is in
line with the predictions from the self-interest hypothesis that commands the
literature.
Our second main finding shows that when we move from generic support to specific
social policies we see outsiders and insiders expecting different things from the
welfare state. Contrary to the literature’s predictions, however, our outsiders prefer
proportional, rather than redistributive, social policies in main areas such as
retirement pensions and unemployment benefit (Häusermann and Schwander, 2009:
14). A possible explanation for this unexpected result can be found in system
justification theory (Jost, Banajii, and Nosek, 2004). This suggests that our outsiders’
willingness to defend and justify the status quo may supersede their self-interested
considerations. Our findings, however, point in another direction. Far from
internalising inequality and reducing ideological dissonance on behalf of the system,
our outsiders want inequality reduced through higher state intervention and shift to
the left. We therefore put forward for consideration an alternative explanation for
5
outsiders’ policy choices: the distinctive conception of social rights, not as equally
distributed natural rights, but as historically conquered entitlements whose terms have
been contracted with the state.
The paper proceeds as follows. In section 2, we introduce the main drivers of welfare
preferences advanced in the literature: self-interest and ideology. To these we add a
third possible driver, legal consciousness. In section 3, we present hypotheses derived
from the aforementioned explanations. In section 4, we discuss our data and
measurement choices. In section 5, we present our results. In section 6, we discuss the
extent to which the findings support our hypotheses and develop a possible alternative
explanation for the unexpected results.
II. Public Attitudes on Welfare Provision in Hard Times
Self-Interest
The debate over how economic crises affect attitudes towards the welfare state is far
from settled, and evidence on this matter is mixed. Most studies to date have assumed
self-interest to be the main driver of welfare preferences. But they have derived
contrasting hypotheses from this assumption, and have reached opposing conclusions
as to the direction welfare attitudes take under conditions of economic hardship.
In two influential works, James E. Alt and R.H. Durr have proposed that public
support for social assistance provision and economic redistribution decreases during
economic crises (Alt, 1979; Durr, 1993). More concretely, they have argued that, as
economic concerns grow, people become more focused on self-interest and give less
