The European welfare states are under significant pressure and are, as a consequence, undergoing various changes. One political strategy to handle the contemporary challenges is to restructure different parts of the welfare state. This paper focuses on the policy aiming to restructure the welfare service sector. Policy is often motivated by changes in public opinion, which can also be argued to contribute to the form, structure and pace of restructuring. Research on policy feedback suggests that public opinion is not only an input in the democratic process, but also an output since public opinion reacts and acts on policy. These reactions are in turn assumed to feed back into the policy process since people express their reactions as preferences in and between elections. In sum, public opinion is deeply entrenched with policy making and varies accordingly. The thermostatic theory of policy feedback hypothesises that people respond to policy changes in relation to their preferred level of policy. In the paper, this theory will be applied to public opinion reactions on the market-oriented reforms of the welfare service sector in Sweden, allowing private actors to provide welfare services. In Social Democratic Welfare states this is a salient change since welfare services traditionally have been provided by the public sector. The general question in the paper is how this policy change affects public attitudes towards privatisation: does the public adjust their preferences in relation to the level of privatisation? And in that case, how is this response likely to influence future welfare policy? In Sweden, privatisation issues are strongly ideological. The proposed analysis of Swedish welfare reforms will investigate if and how these traditional ideological viewpoints interact with reactions to a specific policy.
