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AbstractWelfare attitudes are pivotal in understanding the preferences and demands of citizens to help shape future policy reforms in welfare states. Accordingly, and due to the availability of large scale comparative survey data on attitudes, large numbers of studies of welfare attitudes have emerged during the past few decades. However, some limitations still exist in the field, such as the background assumptions informing the questionnaire design and top–down framing of issues, the population represented, and, lastly, limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings together articles that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to provide some guidance for future studies. This article first summarizes the existing studies on welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes.

This article uses deliberative forums to examine attitudes to UK welfare futures. It makes methodological, empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. We demonstrate the value of the approach, provide insights into attitudes, in particular about priorities and how people link ideas together, and show how the UK's neo-liberal market-centredness fits with enthusiasm for state health care and pensions, desire to close national labour market to immigrants and approval of government interventions to expand opportunities for those who make the effort. Findings point to the strength of the work ethic and individual responsibility alongside a regret that major and highly-valued state services appear unsustainable, the construction of immigrants as simultaneously a burden on provision and unfair labour-market competitors and backing for the development of a 'new risk' welfare state through social investment. The study reveals the complexity of responses to current challenges in an increasingly liberal-leaning welfare state.

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.

Welfare attitudes are pivotal in understanding the preferences and demands of citizens to help shape future policy reforms in welfare states. Accordingly, and due to the availability of large scale comparative survey data on attitudes, large numbers of studies of welfare attitudes have emerged during the past few decades. However, some limitations still exist in the field, such as the background assumptions informing the questionnaire design and top down framing of issues, the population represented and finally limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings together papers that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to provide some guidance for future studies. This paper first summarises the existing studies on welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this special issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes.

Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors - state, market, family/households, employers and charities - but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this 'welfare mix' require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people's views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime theory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also introduces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, but risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Germany and the UK. We collected data using deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people's justifications for their attitudes. Our research indicated patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people's justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in attitudes are resilient.

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people's ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK. ; NORFACE ; Peer Reviewed

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people's ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK.

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people's ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences,with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK. ; We are grateful to NORFACE for funding this research as part of the Welfare Futures project (grant no: 462-14-050). ; publishedVersion

When EU member states signed the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, they did not anticipate the manifold crises in store for them over the following years. Instead of the intended consolidation of a Union which had just gone through its most profound modernisation and biggest round of enlargements, the EU has since then had to weather a wide range of political, economic, social, legal, health and even military crises with major repercussions within and beyond its own territory. Indeed, this time of polycrisis has induced change on many levels: Across the continent and its many fora of European supra-, trans- and international collaboration, established institutions, rule systems and normative frameworks have been put into question and power balances have been shifting. Against this background, actors from social, political, economic and cultural life have sought new ways to overcome the manifold pressing problems of their time, be it through intensified collaboration or attempts to increasingly resolve issues at the national level. This volume offers a compilation of case studies on EU crisis responses, covering the most impactful of the various crises the EU has had to face in recent years. It provides theoretical and conceptual guidelines for the study of political actors' responses to crisis at all levels of the EU multilevel governance system and beyond.