Legitimacy of Labor Market Policy: Public Attitudes Towards Welfare State Responsibility for Job Creation

This article tests a number of hypotheses for explaining the effects of personal and contextual characteristics on attitudes towards the government’s role in job creation. To this end, data from the European Social Survey (ESS4-2008) on 25 European countries are analyzed using a multilevel regression method. The result indicates that Europeans are likely to assign high government responsibility for job provision. Self-interested attitudes toward government responsibility appear to be greater among certain groups holding peripheral labour market status. Sociopolitical ideologies, perceived welfare policy and target group evaluations are also likely to influence attitudes towards government responsibility. On top of that, a set of indicators reflecting self-interest, sociopolitical ideology and evaluative beliefs proved roughly equal amounts of explanatory power that could disclose the tensions in popular attitudes towards labour policy intervention. At the macro level, it is social protection generosity rather than economic context that matters for inter-country divergences in popular attitudes towards employment provisions of welfare states.