This paper takes its point of departure in the recent debate on the relative importance of intersectoral and class-related cleavages in explaining the variation in political support for social protection that are to be found across countries as well as within countries over time. Scholars contributing to the burgeoning literature on varieties of capitalism, on the one hand, argue that the composition of people’s skills is the core determinant of welfare state support. In particular, workers with large endowments of specific skills are said to have a strong incentive to support policies that protect their jobs and income. Advocates of the power resource theory, on the other hand, maintain that welfare state development first and foremost reflects class-related distributive conflict and partisan politics. In this paper I will suggest a way to reconcile these two opposing views about the factors driving welfare state expansion and retrenchment. More precisely, I argue that the relative importance of class- and skill-related cleavages in explaining public support for social protection will depend on the extent to which social insurance entitlements depend on income. By means of a simple formal model I show that when social insurance entitlements are the same for all individuals regardless of their income, support for social protection will follow class lines as argued by the power resource theory. However, if social insurance entitlements are related to earnings conflicts of interest among individuals with different types of skills will dominate class-related strife. These theoretical propositions are then put to empirical test by utilizing a new comprehensive dataset containing detailed information on legal tax and benefits rules for a large number of OECD countries in conjunction with public opinion data on social protection from the ISSP survey from 2006.
