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Britain and Europe: Separate Worlds of Welfare?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Geoffrey Evans
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AS EUROPEAN INTEGRATION BECOMES AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT public policy issue facing both the country and its political leaders, the degree to which Britain can or should harmonize its welfare, employment and taxation policies with those of other EU members will receive progressively more attention. In this context and with the evident importance of opinion poll popularity for the main political parties’ pursuit of electoral success, public opinion on issues concerning welfare, taxation and redistribution is likely to have considerable bearing on the viability of Britain's incorporation of the legislation and practices endorsed in other EU member states. Nonetheless, even a cursory examination of evidence on the public's attitude on questions relating to these changes suggests integration is unlikely to follow a smoothly negotiated path. Responses to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, for example, show that, while holding mixed attitudes towards the idea of European integration and only mildly negative attitudes to EU inf hence over policies concerning pollution, immigration and defence, the British public are strongly opposed to EU influence over taxation and, to some degree, employment policy. Even among those people who endorsed the general aim of European integration, only a minority – in the case of taxation, a very small minority – found the idea of Europeanlevel decision-making acceptable.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 183 - 198
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1998

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References

1 On the difficulties involved in this project, see Montanari, Ingalill Jarensjo, ‘Harmonization of Social Policies and Social Regulation in the European Community’, European Journal of Political Research, 27 (1995), pp. 21–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Evans, Geoffrey, ‘The State of the Union: Attitudes towards Europe’, in Jowell, Roger, Brook, Lindsay and Ahrendt, Daphne (eds), British Social Attitudes: The 12th Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1995.Google Scholar

3 Northcott, Jim, The Future of Britain and Europe, London, Policy Studies Institute, 1995, p. 92.Google Scholar

4 See Peter, Taylor‐Gooby, ‘Eurosclerosis in European Welfare States: Regime Theory and the Dynamics of Change’, Policy and Politics, 24 (1996), pp. 109–23.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., pp. 116–20.

6 Atkinson, Anthony B., Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries: The Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Paris, OECD, 1995.Google Scholar

7 Esping‐Andersen, Gosta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 33.Google Scholar See also Castles, Francis G. and Mitchell, Debra, ‘Identifying Welfare State Regimes: The Links between Politics, Instruments and Outcomes’, Governance, 5 (1992), pp. 1–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 e.g. Dahrendorf, Ralf, ‘Changing Social Values under Mrs Thatcher’, in Skidelsky, Robert (ed.), Thatcherism, London, Chatto & Windus;Google Scholar Hall, Stuart and Jacques, Martin (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1983;Google Scholar Rentoul, John, Me and Mine: The Triumph of the New Individualism, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989.Google Scholar

9 See Crewe, Ivor and Searing, Donald, ‘Mrs Thatcher ’ s Crusade: Conservativism in Britain, 1972–1986’, in Kornberg, Barry Cooper, , Allan, and Mishler, William (eds), The Resurgence of Conservatism in Anglo‐American Democracies, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1988;Google Scholar Heath, Anthony, Jowell, Roger, Curtice, John, Evans, Geoffrey, Field, Julia and Witherspoon, Sharon, Understanding Political Change, Oxford, Pergamon, 1991, pp. 171–85;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Taylor‐Gooby, Peter, ‘Attachment to the Welfare State’, in Jowell, Roger, Brook, Lindsay and Taylor, Bridget (eds), British Social Attitudes: The 8th Report, Aldershot, Gower, 1991.Google Scholar

10 Most recently, see Rasmussen, Jorgen, ‘What Kind of Vision is that? British Public Attitudes towards the European Community during the Thatcher Era’, British Journal of Political Science, 27 (1997), pp. 111–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 An internal comparison of attitudes towards welfare in EU countries can be found in publications forming part of the Beliefs in Government programme. See various chapters in Borre, Ole and Scarbrough, Elinor, (eds), The Scope of Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995;Google Scholar and the summing up in Kaase, Max and Newton, Kenneth, Beliefs in Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar However, the implications of these attitudes for EU harmonization have not been examined either in this work or in the volume directly concerned with attitudes towards European integration – Niedermayer, Oscar and Sinnott, Richard A. (eds), Public Opinion and Internationalized Governance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar Also, the focus of the Beliefs in Government programme is primarily on Western Europe, which inhibits more general comparisons, including the important question of whether British public opinion shares more characteristics with opinion in the Anglodemocracies than it does with opinion in other EU countries.

12 For illustrative comparison, see Smith, Tom, ‘Inequality and Welfare’, in Jowell, Roger, Witherspoon, Sharon and Brook, Lindsay (eds), British Social Attitudes: Special International Report, Aldershot, Gower, 1989;Google Scholar and Taylor‐Gooby, Peter, ‘What Citizens Want from the State’, in Jowell, Roger, Brook, Lindsay and Dowds, Lizanne (eds), International Social Attitudes: The 10th BSA Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1993, pp. 81–101.Google Scholar

13 Recent years have also seen widespread political and ideological attacks on the cost of these sorts of policy, thus heightening their political significance: see, for example, Hibbs, Douglas A. and Madsen, Henrijk J., ‘Public Reaction to the Growth of Taxation and Government Expenditure’, World Politics, 33 (1981), pp. 413–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Offe, Claus, Contradictions of the Welfare State, London, Hutchinson, 1984.Google Scholar It is clear, however, that claims about the degree of public opposition to welfare and taxation have been exaggerated: even in the 1980s there was evidence of broad popular support for a variety of social policies, with majorities also in favour of explicit redistribution. See, for example, Coughlin, Richard, Public Opinion and Welfare Policy, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980;Google Scholar and Shapiro, Robert and Young, John, ‘Public Opinion and the Welfare State: The United States in Comparative Perspective’, Political Science Quarterly, 104 (1989), pp. 59–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See e.g. Cook, Fay L. and Barrett, Edith J., Support for the American Welfare State, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992;Google Scholar Lipset, Seymour Martin, American Exceptionalism: A Double‐Edged Sword, New York, Norton, 1996;Google Scholar Kluegel, James R. and Smith, Eliot R., Beliefs about Inequality: Americans ’ Views of what Is and what Ought to Be, New York, Aldine De Gruyter, 1986;Google Scholar Shapiro, and Young, , op. cit.; and Wilensky, Harold L., The Welfare State and Equality: Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditures, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975.Google Scholar

15 The ISSP involves the administration of cross‐nationally comparable questionnaires as ‘modules’ which form part of national random sample surveys undertaken in an extensive and growing range of countries. For more information see Davis, James A. and Jowell, Roger, ‘Measuring National Differences: An Introduction to the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)’, in Jowell, Roger, Witherspoon, Sharon and Brook, Lindsay (eds), British Social Attitudes: Special International Report, Aldershot, Gower, 1989, pp. 1–13;Google Scholar and Jowell, Roger, Brook, Lindsay and Dowds, Lizanne (eds), International Social Attitudes: The 10th BSA Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1993.Google Scholar

16 Previous cross‐national comparisons using ISSP data have shown differences between a small number of countries – see Evans, Geoffrey, ‘Class Conflict and Inequality’, in Jowell, Roger, Brook, Lindsay and Dowds, Lizanne (eds), International Social Attitudes: The 10th BSA Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1993 pp. 123–43;Google Scholar Smith, op. cit.; Taylor‐Gooby, op. cit. (n. 12) – but they have not tried to examine whether there are national differences in attitudes towards redistribution which persist across several different measurement points, nor have they examined the structure of those differences to see if there are, in fact, distinctive types of welfare cultures.

17 These surveys were conducted as part of the Economic and Social Research Council ’ s ‘East‐West’ research programme, phase II: Grant no. Y 309 25 3025, ‘Emerging Forms of Political Representation and Participation in Eastern Europe’.

18 These were worded as follows: ‘It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes.’‘The government should provide a job for everyone who wants one.’ [Responses: strongly agree; agree; neither agree nor disagree; disagree; strongly disagree; can ’ t choose.]

19 To avoid any difficulties in the cross‐national comparability of intensity expressions (i.e. the difference between ‘agree’ and ‘agree strongly’ may vary across language groups) when comparing distributions, responses to these items have been recoded from a 5 to a 3 point scale (agree/neither/disagree).

20 Respondents were asked: ‘Do you think that people with high incomes should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than those with low incomes, the same share, or a smaller sham?’ [much larger share; larger, the same share; smaller; much smaller share; can ’ t choose].

21 All participating ISSP countries except the Philippines were included in the analysis. The Philippines is a relatively unknown quantity both in terms of its political culture and the characteristics of the survey carried out there.

22 These were the items on support for redistribution and full employment policy shown in Figure 1, plus a third item on minimum wage legislation: ‘The government should provide everyone with a guaranteed basic income.’

23 These checks were concerned to assess whether responses to the items were closely related to each other and formed a uni‐dimensional structure. Principal components analyses indicated that this was the case. Cronbach ’ s alphas averaged comfortably over 0.70 across the countries (details available on request).

24 ‘Differences in income in [respondent ’ s country] are too large ’ [strongly agree; agree; neither agree nor disagree; disagree, strongly disagree; can ’ t choose].

25 Feldman, Stanley and Zaller, John, ‘The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State’, American journal of Political Science, 36 (1992), pp. 268–307;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sniderman, Paul, Tetlock, E. and Brody, Richard A., Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 In the analysis presented in Figure 4 the three items concerning government ’ s role in redistribution, full employment and minimum wage were used to obtain information on distances between countries. Other analyses using more items produce similar results.

27 More specifically, we used hierarchical cluster analysis with the average linked method employing squared Euclidean distance estimates: see Aldenderfer, Mark S. and Blashfield, Roger K., Cluster Analysis, Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Other analyses using different methods of estimation produce similar patterns.

28 More detailed examination of the attitudes of many of these countries is given in Evans, Geoffrey, ‘Mass Political Attitudes and the Development of Market Democracy in Eastern Europe’, in Allan, McCutcheon, (ed.), Survey Research, Democracy and Democratization, Lincoln, Nebr., University of Nebraska Press,Google Scholar forthcoming. Evidence on their economic circumstances and political character is presented in Evans, Geoffrey and Whitefield, Stephen, ‘The Politics and Economics of Democratic Commitment: Support for Democracy in Transition Societies’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), pp. 485–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 A cluster analysis examining just the Western countries also indicates that the Anglo‐democracies of USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, plus Switzerland, are clearly distinct from the other European states, including Britain, with Italy and Norway forming their own sub‐group within the European cluster.

30 A more detailed analysis of the sources of American exceptionalism in this respect is presented in Evans, Geoffrey, ‘Why is America Different? Explaining Cross‐national Variation in Support for Redistributive Policies’, Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends (CREST) Working Paper No. 36, London, Nuffield College and SCPR, 1995.Google Scholar

31 Evidence from Taylor‐Gooby ’ s comparative study of elites indicates that his British interviewees were aware of this characteristic of public opinion, which they saw as a constraint upon effective policy‐making. This would suggest the presence of a gap between the policy goals of political and economic elites and the British public – at least at the time the study was undertaken in 1994–95. See ‐Gooby, Taylor, ‘Eurosclerosis in European Welfare States’, p. 116.Google Scholar