Responsibility Counts, Need Decides: Cross-National Perspectives on Social Risks and Public Support for Welfare Services

This article examines citizens’ support of welfare services to persons experiencing three social risk conditions: learning disabilities, mental health problems and substance misuse problems. These conditions are not usually examined in a welfare context, and there is little knowledge on citizens’ attitudes towards these groups. Mainstream welfare attitude theory emphasises the potence of individual responsibility and need for explaining welfare attitudes. I test the empirical validity on these social risk conditions. The paper analyses survey experiment data (n = 4000) including population samples from Finland, Norway, Romania, and Poland. The findings reveal significant differences in responsibility attribution, with substance misuse perceived as more self-inflicted compared to the other risks. Level of perceived need, operationalised as ability to care for a child, also varies by social risk conditions. Normative support for government-provided services is influenced by both responsibility and need, but the effects vary across countries. Whereas support is strongly associated with perceived need in Romania and Poland, responsibility plays a larger role Finland and Norway. Need also has a moderating effect on responsibility – it matters more when the belief is that a person can care for a child. Implications for policy and legitimacy of welfare systems are discussed.