Conference Agenda

While pre-2000s scholarship generally portrayed Universal Basic Income (UBI) as advantageous for women, post-2000s analyses have introduced a more nuanced perspective, emphasizing potential adverse effects on gender roles and domestic lifestyles. This divergence in scholarly views has led to conflicting opinions among women, both in favour of and opposed to UBI. Empirical investigations into gender-based attitudes toward UBI have yielded inconclusive results, prompting a call for more nuanced examinations.

This study posits that micro and macro-level determinants may influence women's attitudes, with support for UBI potentially stronger among women with lower socioeconomic status in economically underdeveloped nations lacking robust welfare provisions. In theory, individuals in affluent positions may perceive UBI as a mechanism imposing a disproportionate financial burden, particularly through increased taxation on the economically prosperous. The concern lies in the potential trade-off between UBI and existing social benefits for women, such as maternity leave and childcare systems. We examine women’s level of support for introducing UBI in 22 European countries using data from the European Social Survey Round 8 which contains the Welfare attitudes module with socioeconomic status measured with education, employment status, household income, and the perception of household income. At the macro-level, we control for economic development and the country’s welfare system. Offering a multifaceted perspective on women’s attitudes towards UBI, the study contributes to the ongoing debate in academic and policymaking about the support of UBI in Europe.

The perspectives that political parties have towards the Welfare State are mostly seen as a mere reflexion of ideology. Yet, in times of low economic growth, budget-wise constraints may hinder the feasibility of expensive welfare policies that ruling parties promise during electoral campaigns. Thus, if the room for manoeuvre is limited, how do the ruling parties set priorities regarding welfare policies?

This paper seeks to explore this dilemma through a perspective that centres around the welfare preferences of ruling parties' own voters. Are ruling parties responding to what their voters regard as the most vital areas of welfare intervention?

We depart from the assumption that individuals regard social and welfare policies in differentiated degrees. It's expected that older people will attribute more importance to old-age pensions and elderly care assistance. Also, the views each individual has towards the relative importance of different parts of the welfare state vary depending on age, social profile and labour market inclusion.

We'll rely on ESS to explore the correlation between the welfare preferences of voters, and the policies ruling parties enact when in government. In this paper, we'll base our empirical analysis on the case of Portugal.

The decision to use Portugal as our case study is twofolded: firstly, because it has experienced low economic growth rates in the past decades combined with the maturation of an advanced welfare state; and secondly because data shows that voting patterns in Portugal have become increasingly more segmented between labour structures and age in the last decades. The Partido Socialista, or Socialist Party (PS), which has governed Portugal for most of the last two decades, increasingly relies more on retirees´ votes to remain in power, along with other specific labour categories - chief among them, sociocultural professionals.

Given this scenario, we intend to cross ESS data regarding the preferences of PS voters throughout the last two decades (2005-2024), with a qualitative analysis of the welfare policies enacted by the PS government.

Aknowledging the importance that the Welfare State has on European societies, and the challanges it faces on the contemporary political ecossystem, we expect to further contribute to the debate on welfare sustainability, public policy orientation, and voting behaviour.

This project examines the impact of perceptions about the quality of government on support for state-sponsored redistribution. While existing scholarship has identified a number of factors that shape welfare state attitudes, individual evaluations of institutional quality have received relatively little attention. This omission is problematic because many countries around the world suffer from severe governance problems. I seek to address this gap by studying the way in which exposure to information about corruption and institutional inefficiency affects views on the role of the state in alleviating socio-economic inequality. To do this, I rely on two empirical strategies. I begin by running a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis drawing on observational data available through the ESS from 25 European countries over 20 years. I link perceptions of corruption and government inefficiency to views about the role of the state in socio-economic life. I proceed to leverage a natural experiment in Denmark where a public servant was arrested for corruption and embezzlement of especially large proportions during the implementation of one of the ESS waves. This multi-stage empirical approach allows me to explore whether perceptions about corruption and institutional quality are correlated with welfare state attitudes and how respondents’ support for state-sponsored redistribution changes in response to their being primed to think about the quality of the institutional apparatus and the cleanliness of the bureaucratic service in their country.

In the past decades, debates around the proposal of a basic income (BI) have gained tremendous attention in the public spheres. Within this context, BI is often considered as an innovative way of reforming traditional welfare states regimes by unconditionally granting a fixed amount of money to all citizens/residents. Nonetheless, questions arise around the political feasibility of this proposal. Previous research has shown that support for a basic income varies greatly across country and that this support is highly dependent on the specific modalities of the proposal. Nevertheless, very little is known about the conditions, particularly in terms of conditionality (which requirements) and universality (who is the eligible population), under which European citizens are willing to support a BI proposal. This is, however, highly relevant in light of the emerging literature demonstrating that there is widespread support for imposing work requirements as well as preserving welfare provisions for nationals, thereby excluding non-nationals. This research therefore aims to address this gap by providing new insights into the trade-offs European citizens are willing to make in order to support a BI. Using a vignette experiment from the 2023 Cross-National Online Survey, we show that there is a strong preference in all 12 European countries for a conditional BI that imposes work requirements. We also find that European citizens are not unanimously in favor of a BI that excludes non-nationals. On the contrary, there are much more country-specific differences in terms of support for a BI that includes different population groups. Finally, there is a clear trade-off between conditionality and universality, as citizens are less likely to oppose a BI if non-nationals are required to work.