Iceberg of discontent? Emotional responses to welfare state development and political trust

An association between welfare state performance evaluations and political trust has been observed in Europe for a long time. The independent variables in this research typically come from concrete and cognitively oriented survey questions about specific services and social protection. The role of diffuse emotions is often implicitly recognized but not empirically measured. Using primary 2022 panel data, we develop novel measures of emotional reactions to the development of public services and social protection. Such “welfare state emotions” capture significantly more negativity and dissatisfaction than previously found in this policy domain. However, consistent with work on political emotions they also reveal complexity in that negative and positive emotions form relatively independent dimensions. Moreover, welfare state emotions are only weakly correlated with traditional concrete performance evaluations measures. Meanwhile, fixed effects panel models suggest a causal relationship between emotions and political trust also when controlling for traditional measures.