Recent research suggests that support for the welfare state is not as pervasive as the blame avoidance hypothesis (Pierson 1996) presumes: right parties retrench more often than left parties (Scruggs and Allan 2004, Korpi and Palme 2003) and some parties even gain votes for retrenching (Giger and Nelson 2011). While socio-economic cleavages continue to shape retrenchment processes, significant cross-national variation also exists and this study aims to explain this variation by examining how the preferences of party’s constituencies vary systematically depending on the way in national adjustment processes coped with the tighter monetary regime. Survey data from the ESS between 2002 and 2009 to test the effect of national socio-economic indicators on individuals’ positions towards the welfare state.
