Welfare state retrenchment research usually assumes strong popular support for welfare state policies in general. In this view, parties will most often risk being punished electorally when making cuts in popular programmes. However, support for welfare state has become more multi-dimensional and policy-specific due to changes in social risks as well as in the context in which social policy is made. Different risk groups might favour specific policies that directly benefit them, while policy choices of parties have become less static and more motivated by their need to compete with other parties.
While general attitudes towards the welfare state have been extensively studied, it is far less clear how support for specific aspects of the welfare state translate into distinct voting patterns. This in turn is important in understanding how the electorate of different parties might react to cuts in different kinds of social spending and how parties can target their policy choices. In this paper, we propose a model of vote choice based on attitudes towards different dimensions of welfare state support, such as redistributive vs. social insurance policies, or policies responding to new social risks. We also control for the extent to which these preferences are linked to individual interests. We then compare preferences of voters with party positions in recent retrenchment efforts in Switzerland. We use data from the 2011 Swiss Electoral Studies which includes an extensive module on welfare state attitudes and show that attitudes towards specific policy dimensions are a better predictor of voting behaviour than the overall support for the welfare state, but that self-interest insufficiently explains these attitudes. Some support for the hypothesized relationship between voter preferences and party positions is also found.
