COVID‐19 Labor Market Protection and Support for the Welfare State: Job Retention Versus Job Loss in Four European Countries

ABSTRACT The COVID‐19 pandemic presents a natural setting to study how labor market protection policies may influence welfare attitudes because while lockdowns and economic recession threatened millions of jobs, job retention schemes shielded many workers from unemployment. We investigate support for unemployment protection and the unemployed among people active in the labor force and participating in the Mannheim Corona Study in Germany, Coping with COVID‐19 in France, ResPOnsE in Italy, and the British Social Attitudes survey in Great Britain. Two‐way fixed effects analyses on the German data show that there was a general increase in respondents' support over the onset of the pandemic and that while job loss significantly boosted support, there was little attitudinal difference between those who experienced job retention and those who continued working. We confirm these patterns with cross‐sectional analyses in all four countries, providing comparative insight into attitudes across the largest European economies. Unemployment is materially similar to job retention, but because it is associated with higher support, we contend that nonmaterial factors such as risk perceptions may be consequential in influencing preference changes when individuals lose their jobs.