Dear all,

Some of you may be interested in the panel ‘The Unpopularity of Welfare State Reform: Exploring the Micro-Foundation of Standard Assumptions’ at the ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux, 4-7 September 2013, chaired by Michael Baggesen-Klitgaard (University of Southern Denmark) and with me as discussant. The deadline for proposing a paper is 1 February and can be done through the ECPR website: http://new.ecpr.eu/Conferences/General/2013_Bordeaux/Default.aspx.

Panel abstract

This panel wishes to explain how and why voters react to welfare state reform and related policy changes that impose concentrated losses and immediate pain in return for diffuse benefits. Nearly two decades of research in welfare state retrenchment adhered to the assumption that such changes are unpopular, mobilize strong opposition and cause electoral punishment of the governments responsible. However, the unpopularity of reforms, the mobilization against them, and how and why voters react to loss-imposing policy changes are typically assumed rather than spelled out and researched.

Hence, this panel opens an avenue for a range of questions to be addressed theoretically and empirically. For example, do voters’ reactions to harmful welfare state reforms and policy changes vary across different welfare state regimes? Do the institutional characteristics of the policy programs in question influence these reactions? Do voters’ reactions depend on the partisan composition of the reform-government and/or the state of the economy? Or should we focus on voters' psychological characteristics and personality traits, as recent research that detects causal relationships between personality traits and individuals' self-reported attitudes toward social and economic issues suggests?

We invite papers dealing with such questions – especially at the micro-level. We welcome papers based on cross-sectional and/or cross-country comparisons, using qualitative, quantitative, and experimental research techniques.

Best wishes, Barbara Vis

Prof. dr. Barbara Vis
Fenna Diemer Lindeboom Chair in Political Decision-Making
Department of Political Science

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