Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal before and after the Financial Crisis
| Author | Cícero Roberto Pereira,Filipe Carreira da Silva,Mónica Brito Vieira |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716651653 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716651653
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(3) 535 –558
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716651653
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Waiting for Godot? Welfare
Attitudes in Portugal before
and after the Financial Crisis
Mónica Brito Vieira1, Filipe Carreira da Silva2,3
and Cícero Roberto Pereira4
Abstract
Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this
question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this
empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own
follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the
socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy
preferences predicts an increased polarisation in opinions towards the welfare state between
different groups within society – in particular between labour market insiders and outsiders.
However, the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualised country,
Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal
change, and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no
polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so.
Keywords
welfare state, welfare attitudes, 2008 financial crisis, Portugal, social rights
Accepted: 13 April 2016
Introduction
Eight years on, most Europeans still grapple with the effects of the financial crisis of 2008:
budget deficits and public debt, shrinking economies, insufficient job creation, high unem-
ployment, increased labour market vulnerability and rising inequality. Despite being wide-
spread, these effects are stronger in some countries than in others. Bailed-out Portugal has
been one of Europe’s hardest hit nations. The implementation of the austerity package
brokered between the Portuguese government and the so-called Troika – the three
1University of York, York, UK
2Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
3Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
4Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil
Corresponding author:
Filipe Carreira da Silva, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
Email: fcs23@cam.ac.uk
651653PSX0010.1177/0032321716651653Political StudiesVieira et al.
research-article2016
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536 Political Studies 65 (3)
international organisations (the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European
Commission and the European Central Bank) from which the country sought financial
assistance – implied various cutbacks and significant changes to social benefits. These
occurred as the Portuguese economy faced its worst downturn since the mid-1970s, with
unemployment and the risk of being atypically employed reaching record levels, and
demand for social welfare provision expanding at an equal pace.
Taking Portugal as our case study, this article addresses a question that the literature on
welfare politics has barely begun to answer: whether welfare attitudes change in times of
hardship and how (see, for example, Taylor-Gooby, 2001). In particular, we want to assess
whether these changes translate themselves into a more differentiated public opinion, with
new cleavages arising between different categories of people, namely labour market insid-
ers and outsiders. Given the deep insider–outsider divisions known to characterise the
Portuguese labour force, and given how hard the crisis has hit the country, Portugal should
offer a critical case for theories about change and polarisation of welfare attitudes during
crises. In Harry Eckstein’s original formulation, critical cases can be ‘least’ or ‘most’ likely
to confirm theoretical predictions (Eckstein, 1975). We argue that Portugal is a most likely
case since it is a case that many scholars considering our theoretical claims would predict
to achieve a certain outcome and yet, as we shall see, it does not do so (Gerring, 2007).
We start by drawing upon two main strands of theoretical explanations for change of
social attitudes towards welfare provision. The first centres on economic self-interest, the
second on the role of partisanship and ideology in determining welfare attitudes. We test
a set of predictions stemming from each of these accounts using novel data from a survey
carried out in early 2013, at the peak of the crisis. This replicated most of the established
2008 module on welfare attitudes of the European Social Survey (ESS), while it also
included specific questions on what people think, say and do about social rights. These
data allow us to test a third explanation, normally overlooked in the literature: whether
legal consciousness impacts on preferences about welfare policy. In particular, the legal
consciousness of social rights (henceforth, ‘social rights consciousness’) refers to a spe-
cific component of our value and belief system, namely, the ways in which we conceive
of our social entitlements, and how these affect the ways in which we act with respect to
them (Da Silva, 2013; see also Da Silva and Valadez, 2015). Theoretically, this represents
a fresh contribution to our understanding of attitudinal variation, and it comes justified by
the fact that often, and certainly in the case of Portugal, support for government welfare
provision is framed by a conception of social services and benefits as legal rights.
Our study shows that public opinion on the welfare state does change in hard times.
However, the ways in which it changes are not always consistent with the predictions in
the literature. This double-edged finding can be disaggregated into three more specific
results.
First, as expected, support for state intervention in welfare provision increased in the
aftermath of the crisis. This generalised increase in support was accompanied with, but
not explained by, a general ideological shift of the population to the left. However, it did
not translate itself into a willingness to pay taxes to sustain the extension of the provision.
Both of these findings are true for outsiders and insiders. But there are some differences:
while the lack of support for an increase in taxation cuts equally across groups, outsider-
ness accentuates support for increased provision, which is in line with the predictions
from the self-interest hypothesis that commands the literature.
Our second main finding shows that when we move from generic support to specific
social policies, we see outsiders and insiders expecting different things from the welfare
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