The Contribution of Deliberative Forums to Studying Welfare State Attitudes – a United Kingdom Study

Abstract

This article introduces Democratic Forums as a method to study attitudes towards the welfare state and sets out briefly its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with existing methods. This is done by reporting the findings of United Kingdom based two-day forum in 2015 in which the future of the welfare state was discussed by a largely representative sample of participants. The results show that participants linked up both moral and economic arguments to come to two major frames that could encompass the debates surrounding welfare state futures. One focuses on the inefficiencies of the welfare state which found that the welfare resources were largely misdirected and unsustainable. The other focuses on the possibilities for improving it via social investment, for example providing individuals with better training and education opportunities. The democratic forum method is helpful in allowing researchers to investigate the conceptual framings people use when thinking about the welfare state and to see how people link different concepts and justifications together to argue their position. We argue that this framing can be distinct from that used and understood by policy makers and academics, and those applied in the more commonly used large scale surveys.