Trade-Offs in Social Policy Reforms: Interacting Policy Context and Socio-Structural Characteristics

Under what conditions can welfare states be reformed? What are the determinants of attitudes towards welfare state reform in times of austerity and – consequently – towards contentious policy trade-offs? We address this question in the field of pension policy reform, an area of the welfare state that is particularly strongly affected by policy legacies and trade-offs between different social groups (classes, generations, gender etc.). We ask two main questions: a) under what conditions are individuals willing to accept retrenchment of their benefits? And b) what explains the relative importance individuals attribute to different dimensions of welfare reform (retrenchment, activation, poverty relief etc.)? These questions are at the heart of much recent research on social policy preferences. While a growing literature studies how different policy contexts affect such preferences, we investigate in this paper how a specific policy context interacts with individual socio-demographic characteristics in explaining them. Studying political exchange, trade-offs and relative importance is almost impossible in standard survey analysis. Hence, we rely on experimental conjoint survey analysis, applied to the ongoing pension reform in Switzerland, the most ambitious and encompassing retrenchment reform of the past three decades. The conjoint survey prompts respondents to choose between different policy packages. This methodological technique is perfectly suited to examine individual preferences in the context of multi-dimensional reforms. The analysis relies on data from an original online survey experiment with 1’873 respondents, yielding over 18’000 single ratings of specific policy packages. Thanks to detailed information on the personal background of the respondents (gender, age, education, occupation, family situation, party identification etc.), we are able to study how the specific policy context of Swiss old age income insurance interacts with micro-level characteristics. Our findings bear important implications for the reform capacity of Western European social security systems in an era of “permanent austerity”.