Losers’ Consent in Changing Welfare States: Output Dissatisfaction, Experienced Voice and Political Distrust
| Author | Lisanne de Blok,Staffan Kumlin |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721993646 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721993646
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 867 –886
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721993646
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Losers’ Consent in Changing
Welfare States: Output
Dissatisfaction, Experienced
Voice and Political Distrust
Lisanne de Blok1 and Staffan Kumlin2
Abstract
Mature welfare states must increasingly handle growing fiscal pressures and a multitude of needs
with smaller resources. Meanwhile, evaluations of policy outputs are characterized as ‘the weakest
link’ in welfare state support, resulting in generalized political distrust. We assess the procedural
fairness argument that citizens are not only concerned with welfare state outcomes but also
assess the fairness of the processes of service delivery. The fairness perspective has usually been
tested in cross-sectional studies, experiments or on the ‘input side’ of democracy. By contrast, we
use primary three-wave panel data on evaluations and experiences with welfare state institutions.
The random-effects within-between framework allows improved causal evidence that both
outputs (service quality satisfaction) and procedural fairness (experienced voice opportunities)
affect political trust. Crucially, however, perceived fairness mitigates detrimental effects of poor
outcomes. This is because procedural voice matters, especially for the formation of political trust
among losers.
Keywords
political trust, procedural fairness, welfare state
Accepted: 15 January 2021
Introduction
Mature Western welfare states have long faced slowly growing challenges and resource
scarcity. Demographic change, persistent unemployment, international economic compe-
tition – to mention a few oft-debated ‘reform pressures’ – strain public finances while
fuelling competition between legitimate needs. Recently, periodic shocks like the 2008
financial crisis and the 2015 refugee influx have contributed further to this situation.
1 Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
2Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Corresponding author:
Lisanne de Blok, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: e.a.de.blok@vu.nl
993646PSX0010.1177/0032321721993646Political Studiesde Blok and Kumlin
research-article2021
Article
868 Political Studies 70(4)
Welfare state policies are changing in response (Beramendi et al., 2015). Reforms are
complex and multidimensional, involving non-negligible retrenchment of ‘old’ social
rights, but also significant ‘recalibration’ to address ‘new social risks’. Similarly, benefit
schemes are redesigned to stimulate employment incentives, at the same time as the wel-
fare state is increasingly seen as an instrument for ‘social investment’ in human capital
(Morel et al., 2012; Ronchi, 2018). Moreover, welfare states have become more ‘dual-
ized’ such that benefits remain reasonably intact for ‘insiders’, while ‘outsiders’ are
denied full access due to non-standard employment (Emmenegger et al., 2012). Overall,
while not all policy change is destructive, the totality of reform underscores how welfare
states must handle an expanding set of needs and goals with smaller resources.
Scholars are increasingly examining how citizens’ political orientations respond to
these transformations. For example, there is increasing interest in how citizens actually
evaluate welfare state outputs. A powerful observation is that perceived output malper-
formance of welfare state services and benefits constitute ‘the weakest link in welfare
state support’ (Roosma et al., 2013: 250). Citizens generally experience some divergence
between their normative support for the welfare state and their more critical evaluations
of its actual performance. Although these critical output evaluations rarely affect specific
political orientations, such as party or policy preferences, they have important conse-
quences for broader ‘democratic citizenship’ variables, including generalized trust in
democratic institutions, processes and actors (cf. Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, 2017, for a
recent overview). Of course, such orientations have long been considered essential for the
stability and survival of democratic systems (Almond and Verba, 1963).
These observations in turn raise an important problem: how can political trust be main-
tained in an era of resource scarcity and consequential output-related dissatisfaction? We
assess the procedural fairness argument that citizens are in fact not only concerned with
outputs in terms of perceived service quality. Citizens also respond to various fairness
aspects of the processes through which social protection and services are experienced. Fair
processes may boost political trust independently of outputs, that is, controlling one for the
other. More than this, however, output and process evaluations may interact, such that fair
processes become especially important among those dissatisfied. If true, procedural fairness
can mitigate the detrimental effect of welfare-state-related dissatisfaction. To test such argu-
ments, we use primary individual-level panel data regarding citizens’ evaluations and expe-
riences with welfare state institutions in Norway. This data set allows rich operationalization
of public service evaluations. Crucially, it includes the key procedural fairness aspect of
experienced ‘voice’ opportunities in encounters with welfare state institutions.
We contribute to the extant research in three distinct ways. First, an empirical contri-
bution arises as research on the relationship between procedural fairness and political
trust remains scarce (cf. Linde, 2011), despite important contributions in the past decade
(for an overview, see Grimes, 2017). Studies on the ‘trust-as-evaluation’ approach, which
predicts that political trust is driven by public satisfaction with political performance,
have predominantly focused on output satisfaction. The few studies that do consider pro-
cedural quality as a driver of political trust focus primarily on the perceived fairness of
input processes, either for the government in general (e.g. Linde, 2011; Ulbig, 2002) or
for a single government agency or act (Carman, 2010; Esaiasson, 2010; Grimes, 2006).
By relying on measures of output service evaluations, in combination with measures of
perceived procedural fairness in contacts with a large range of welfare state institutions,
we provide a different and more specific test of the procedural fairness hypothesis on the
‘output side’ of democracy.
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