Eco-social attitudes and welfare regimes: A critical assessment

Emerging literature on eco-social welfare states suggests synergies between welfare and climate policy goals. It has been argued that such synergies show up as ‘dual support’ for both welfare and climate policies among the public. The synergies are expected to be strongest in the Nordic countries, but we lack a thorough theorizing on how these attitudes are formed. In this article, we hypothesize that eco-social attitudes are shaped by welfare state regimes due to differences in the welfare systems, job markets and industry and class structure in each regime. We use the European Social Survey (2016) data from 22 countries, supplemented with data on energy production and jobs in fossil-intensive industry, to test our theoretical expectations on the distribution of eco-social attitudes across Europe. We use different operationalizations of eco-social attitudes to inspect whether the results are driven by choice of measurement. The data is analyzed using multinomial multilevel regression. Our analyses show that there are connections between welfare regimes and eco-social attitudes, but the results are contingent on the operationalization chosen. Moreover, not all observed regime effects are necessarily about welfare regimes. They can be ascribed to other factors also, such as jobs in fossil-intensive industries. This has important implications for the study of eco-social attitudes and attitudes towards climate change policies in a broader sense.