The increase in the number of citizens that feel alienated from politics is causing no little worry to political scientists and politicians alike. Researchers have studied the socio-demographic characteristics that determine political alienation as well as the macro consequences of this phenomenon for democracies. But more rarely have we looked at the actual ideas and beliefs about political topics of those that, apparently, should have nothing to say. We assume that citizens with no ideology, information and interest in politics have no opinion on core political issues. Is that so? Do apolitical people have no political opinions? This article tries to answer the question by analyzing what people estranged from politics have to say regarding different aspects of the Welfare State. We use the terms “estranged from politics” and “apolitical” interchangeably, to define citizens that have either: a) no interest in political affairs; b) no ideology; c) no information about political affairs; or d) no political activity. The research strategy is based in the combination of comparative and case-study approaches. We start by looking at the effect of estrangement from politics on attitudes to state intervention in welfare using the European Social Survey 2008 and data for 21 European countries. Complementing this general overview, the second part is devoted to a more in-depth study of attitudes to the WS of “very” political and “very” apolitical citizens in Spain. In this section we widen the number of dependent variables to look at differences between political and apolitical citizens in the evaluation of the social situation, the performance of core welfare programs, the social, economic and moral consequences of the WS, the preferred distribution of benefits (contributory or flat rate), the adequate level of funding for welfare programs and the better way of collecting taxes. Even if our conclusions are restricted to welfare issues, we believe that they can be useful to assess the possible consequences of an increase political disaffection for the legitimacy of political institutions.
