Under what conditions do citizens support future-oriented welfare reforms? Public opinion and second dimension welfare politics

Important reforms are necessary to adjust today’s welfare states to the challenges of post-industrial knowledge economies. Public opinion, however, is often sceptical towards large-scale reforms, especially when the benefits will accrue only in the future. We analyse the conditions that affect citizens’ support for such reforms on the basis of original survey experiments from two novel public opinion surveys in nine countries. We test the role of ‘supply-side factors’, referring to characteristics of the reform design itself (its policy field, distributive reform effect, time horizon, and costs) and ‘demand-side factors’, that is, respondents’ characteristics and ideological orientations. We argue and demonstrate that among these ‘demand-side factors’, positions on the socio-cultural ideological dimension between universalism and particularism are key to explaining support for future-oriented social investment reforms. We thereby provide robust new evidence highlighting the role of ‘second dimension politics’ for welfare state reform.