Social institutions and the Cold War: The role of culture in welfare state attitudes

Many theoretical perspectives predict that culture shapes welfare state attitudes, but scholars struggle to test these predictions. Certain cultural values should shape preferences for state provided pensions, health care and unemployment to name a few. Yet culture is difficult to measure, and reliability of causal effects comes into question when culture and attitudes are measured at the same time in the same survey. In this paper I propose that the institutions of the Cold War offer an opportunity to test for an impact of culture on welfare state attitudes. To do so, I propose that looking at the meaning of the state underlying individual social welfare policy attitudes as opposed to the degree of support expressed by those attitudes will test this proposition. I expect that in formerly Communist societies the government state behind the provision of welfare is a more total and encompassing attitude object produced by the top-down and singularly cohesive Communist cultural institutions. Moreover, those Soviet countries under Communist institutions the longest should show larger Communist cultural influence on individual attitudes than those that were later annexed. Finally, individuals born and socialized to working age under Communism should also show a larger influence of Communist cultural institutions as opposed to those socialized more into the new market societies. To test these propositions this paper conducts factor analysis and tests of measurement invariance to identify the underlying structure of welfare state attitudes in former East and West countries using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Wave 4, conducted around 2008.