Who thinks ideologically about welfare state reform? Partisanship and attitude consistency in politicians’ and mass public perceptions about the consequences of welfare service privatization in Sweden

When studying attitudes toward the welfare state or evaluations of welfare reforms, research has tended to focus on what people think rather than how they think about specific issues. Moreover, the effects of the mobilizing efforts of political parties on attitudes and belief systems are often theorized separately from the normative institutional feedback effects common to the welfare state literature. In this paper, I propose that elite political rhetoric and institutional norms may exert dual pressures leading to partisan differences in the propensity to think ideologically among the mass public, defined as a positive relationship between holding internally consistent attitudes and taking a partisan issue position. Drawing on the case of welfare service privatization in Sweden, I point out how the rhetoric of the right – emphasizing choice and private property – frequently contradicts norms about universality long espoused by the Swedish welfare state, while the rhetoric of the left – emphasizing equality of access and outcomes – is better aligned with such institutional norms. The analysis of survey data demonstrated that centre-right sympathizers, the prime receivers of conflicting elite versus institutional messages, frequently took a middling position, being neither positive nor negative, to the consequences of welfare service privatization, and that, unlike centre-right politicians and sympathizers and politicians of left parties, this position did not differ according to attitude consistency. Furthermore, political interest enhanced this relationship among right sympathizers but was of little consequence to left sympathizers, implying that in the case of a conflict between institutional norms and political rhetoric, only the most attentive sympathizers are likely to engage in ideological thinking on the basis of partisanship.