The current awareness of globalization has raised the hot debate on their relation and the consequences to the welfare state. There is a whole body of literature on this topic, but its results are ambiguous. According to the “compensation” hypothesis, globalization expands the welfare-state in order to mediate the risk effect of global market. To the contrary, adepts of the “efficiency” hypothesis believe the opposite, namely that globalization causes welfare retrenchment due to the “race of the bottom” caused by the intensified tax competition. An attempt to test these hypotheses eventually led to the assertion that “domestic institutions matter”. While most of the existing research examines various objective indicators of the welfare state (e.g. social spending), this paper is aimed at giving the insight on the relationship between globalization and more subjective foundation of the welfare state, i.e. preferences for its support, which has been hardly ever examined before. It seems topical to build an empirically reliable model, also including into the analysis the notions of institutions, which were already proved to be influential. According to our preliminary regression analysis based on the one-level pooled data, globalization indeed is highly related to support for the redistribution. The main finding is that this effect remains the same even after controlling for salience of the welfare arrangements. The other finding is that the actual influence of globalization is ambiguous: while its social dimension increases the support, economic – decreases it. In addition, various dimensions of the welfare arrangements also appeared to have different effect: higher unemployment benefits are linked with more support, but higher sick benefits reduces it.
