Conditional gender gaps in welfare state support: The role of labor market and household inequality

Abstract Why are women more supportive of the welfare state than men? Existing literature on this attitudinal gender gap focuses mainly on how men and women, on average, experience varied risks in the labor market. Feminist scholarship argues that the welfare state has the potential to equalize within-household bargaining power between men and women, but has not fully explored the political implications of contemporary inequality dynamics within low- vs. high-income households. We theorize that the gender gap in welfare state support is shaped by the interplay between households’ position on the income distribution and women’s relative incomes within households. Using Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data from 1963 to 2024, we first find that, within households, women’s income relative to male partners falls systematically moving up the income distribution. Next, our analyses of 2016 International Social Survey Programme data show that gender gaps in welfare state support are narrow and statistically uncertain among lower-income households, where need is high. However, in higher-income households, gender gaps emerge and grow moving up the household income distribution. Furthermore, attitudinal gaps in higher-income households are sensitive to inequalities in relative income – large where male incomes predominate and narrow or nonexistent in households where women contribute half or more of income. Gender inequality and its political consequences are thus intertwined with broader structures of income inequality.