Public Opinion and Long-Term Investment – Under What Conditions Do Citizens Support Future-Oriented (Welfare) Reforms?

Welfare states around the globe are challenged by the transition for industrial to post-industrial knowledge economies. Important reforms are thus necessary to readjust today’s welfare states. Yet, these reforms are usually costly and their outcomes often remain uncertain and likely to materialize only in the distant future. Consequently, policy-makers have struggled to enact such reforms, especially because public opinion often is a latent veto point for transformative policy change (Pierson 1996). Thus, observers are questioning the reform capacity of mature welfare states particularly regarding long-term investments. This paper aims at better understanding the conditions under which welfare states (and public policy more generally) can be reformed and long-term investments are possible. Focusing on public opinion, we analyze under what conditions citizens are willing to accept future-oriented reforms. We identify a range of potential conditions: on the one hand, these refer to the reform proposal itself (its policy field, distributive reform effect, time horizon, and costs). On the other hand, we focus on a range of individual-level factors (self-interest, ideological predispositions). We point particularly at the role of political trust. Trust matters because it serves as a ‘cognitive heuristic’ when respondents judge reform proposals, and becomes all the more important the more uncertain and risky the reforms are. Empirically, we draw on genuine public opinion data from two representative surveys in nine countries. We designed several survey experiments to explore under what conditions citizens accept long-term investments and future-oriented welfare reforms. Therefore, we can offer micro-level causal evidence for our theory.