Ripples Underneath the Calm. Making Sense of Welfare State Preference Formation

The welfare state remains one of the most salient issues in electoral politics. At the same time, with an aging population, deep economic transformations, and climate and security crises requiring new investments, the welfare state is seeing increasing pressure for reform. Most democratic leaders, consequently, face a common challenge: Given the significant need for welfare state reforms, how can reelection-seeking decisionmakers introduce welfare cuts without facing electoral backlash? Two widely different answers to this question exist. One answer comes from a central line in the welfare state literature, which argues that citizens are unwavering welfare maximizers who refuse any reduction in material benefits. In sharp contrast to this perspective, other studies show that voters’ preferences for welfare are, at least under certain circumstances, malleable. In this paper, we align these seemingly competing findings. This allows us to better understand the dynamics of welfare state preferences and, crucially, the space available for politicians to introduce reforms without employing strategies that hide them away from public view. We test the argument in a pre-registered survey with 18,000 participants in Denmark.