Does welfare state retrenchment affect government popularity? This is a highly debated question and according to the new politics perspective governments hesitate to engage in such reforms due to almost guaranteed electoral repercussions. However, recent studies suggest that governments are able to electorally survive even major welfare state reform and that retrenchment does not always entail electoral backlash. This paper studies the reform processes and the communicative strategies utilized by governments and oppositions during presentation of major reforms. We develop a theoretical model predicting in which situations governments will lose and gain popular support – and in which instances government popularity will remain unaffected by the implementation of welfare state retrenchment. To empirically evaluate our theoretical propositions we study how the central political actors frame the reform issue in the mass media and how this possibly affects public opinion polls at the point in time where the reform is first presented. We engage in a comparative case study of 20 labor market reforms adopted in the Netherlands and Denmark in the period 1982-2011.
