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How Europeans Combine Support for Social Rights and Work Obligations of the Unemployed: Effects of Individual Predictors and Institutional Design

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Abstract

A long tradition of welfare attitudes research acknowledges that a substantial share of European citizens are supportive of organising social protection against unemployment, but less attention is given to how this support relates to support for the work obligations that characterise contemporary demanding activation policies. Using data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016), we investigate how individuals combine support for welfare rights and work obligations of the unemployed. Subsequently, we analyse whether the choice for a particular combination of rights and obligations is determined by individual characteristics and characteristics of a country’s welfare system. We find that high support for welfare rights does not necessarily imply opposition against work obligations, and that a relevant group of citizens supports generous benefits and harsh sanctions at the same time. Preferences for combinations of rights and obligations are mainly driven by ideological values, and partly by self-interest variables. At the country level, we find a link between citizens’ preferences and generosity of unemployment benefits. In highly generous institutional settings, individuals are less likely to want harsh sanctions combined with relatively high support for welfare rights, but are more in favour of moderate punishment for noncompliant unemployed combined with support for welfare rights.

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Notes

  1. The ESS wave 8 includes also Russia and Israel, but these countries are not included in the analyses because information on the contextual variables are not available.

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Funding

This work was supported by the project “European Social Survey: Monitoring social and political change in Europe” (grant number I001519N). The second author would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the scholarship that made it possible to work on this project.

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  1. Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, Box 3601, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Federica Rossetti & Bart Meuleman

  2. Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Sciensano, Juliette Wytsmanstraat 14, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Federica Rossetti

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  1. Federica Rossetti
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Correspondence to Federica Rossetti.

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Appendix

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Table 3 Country means of the items. Design weights are applied
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Table 4 Class sizes, means, thresholds and conditional probabilities of the four-class solution (N = 38,942; no clusters specified)
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Table 5 Descriptive statistics of country-level variables
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Fig. 4
figure 4

Elbow plot for the latent class solutions

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Rossetti, F., Meuleman, B. How Europeans Combine Support for Social Rights and Work Obligations of the Unemployed: Effects of Individual Predictors and Institutional Design. Soc Indic Res 170, 485–505 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03186-7

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