The focal point of the literature on policy feedbacks (Campbell, 2012; Soss & Schram, 2007) is to investigate how public policies impact upon citizens’ attitudes. The contemporary changes in the distribution of power across Europe provide interesting empirical material to address this strand of research. As long shown by theories of state-building in Western Europe, welfare systems had been a powerful tool used by political centers to build up a sense of a national community, to legitimate national political actors, and thereby the nation-state (Bartolini, 2005). But since the 1970’s, central states are not the sole providers of welfare anymore as regional governments have been entrusted with social policy responsibilities (Keating & McEwen, 2005). If one takes seriously the hypothesis of policy feedbacks, major changes in the legitimacy structure should therefore be noticed.
Starting from the classical distinction between input-oriented and output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999), this paper examines how the restructuring of European (welfare) states has affected the legitimacy attributed to regional and national levels of government. The legitimacy is operationalized by citizens’ preferences for the allocation of policy responsibility (De Winter, Swyngedouw, & Goeminne, 2008). Specifically, the paper explores how the features of regional social policy impact upon citizens’ preferences for the allocation of social policy responsibility in a complex and multilevel polity. It hypothesizes that the visibility and the traceability of social policy (Pierson, 1993) are key to the explanation of the feedback effects of regional social policy on citizens’ preferences for the regional, respectively the national, level.
Empirically, the paper draws on the regional authority index built by Marks, Hooghe & Schakel (2008), and on secondary survey data (EVS, ESS and Eurobarometers). Additionally, the paper uses qualitative and quantitative contextual data on regional policy.
