Individualization: A double-edged sword: Welfare,the experience of social risks and the need for social insurance in the Netherlands

Abstract

Spanish

French

For various reasons the process of individualization has always been supposed to be linked to a decline in welfare state support. Because of individualization, it is commonly argued people appreciate collectively organized welfare less and less. This article studies whether individualists really support the welfare state less than collectivists. In order to examine this, the authors use data collected in 2006 in the Netherlands. Distinguishing between two types of individualism, the study finds that people who are structurally disembedded from their institutional environment – the structural individualists – do not indeed support the welfare state. Moreover, for these structural individualists, the socioeconomic risks they run and their actual class position do not translate into support for the welfare state. Contrary to this, the study finds that people who can be classified as cultural individualists – those who emphasize individuality – are more supportive of the welfare state. For these cultural individualists it is also found that their socioeconomic position and interests influence the way they think about the welfare state. Cultural individualists hence are more supportive of the welfare state, and especially so for those in weak socioeconomic positions.

Keywords

Public support social risks structural and cultural individualization values welfare state legitimacy

Introduction

In the literature on the legitimacy of the welfare state, it is often implied that there is a crisis of the welfare state. One of the reasons for this is the process of individualization that leads to a decline in the legitimacy of the welfare state (e.g. Giddens, 1994; Inglehart, 1997; Trommel and Van der Veen, 1999). Yet, while most authors refer to individualization, its conceptualization differs widely, and with that the reasons for it causing an alleged decline in support for the welfare state – i.e. support for a collectively organized system which protects a variety of social groups against a number of socioeconomic risks such as unemployment, sickness and the like.¹ While there are numerous interpretations and conceptualizations of individualization, most boil down to two central ideas: cultural and structural individualization (e.g. Atkinson, 2007: 353).

The first, cultural individualization, can be defined as growing ideals of individual liberty and freedom. A number of studies have shown that people have increasingly been emphasizing ideals of individual freedom, self-actualization and individual level political participation (e.g. Duyvendak, 2004; Inglehart, 1977, 1997), and that more collectivist values have lost their relevance (Flanagan and Lee, 2003; Houtman, 2003; Inglehart, 1997). Cultural individualization is said to undermine welfare state support for two reasons. The first, and most straightforward reason is that as more and more people emphasize individual freedom, collectively organized institutions such as the welfare state may be under pressure. In this perspective, a system of collectively shared risks is an anachronism. Second, whereas this value change towards individualism is typically measured by the postmaterialism index – cultural individualists and collectivists are postmaterialists and materialists respectively – the suggestion is made that materialists deeply value the welfare state, and that postmaterialists are not concerned about materialist issues and hence do not care as much for the welfare state (Inglehart, 1997; see also Van Oorschot, 2000: 39). Hence, whether cultural individualization is measured and seen as a decrease in cultural collectivism or in materialism, the suggestion is made that this form of individualization seriously undermines welfare state support.

The second concept of individualization entails a more structuralist, or better yet, poststructuralist approach. This approach is concerned with the way in which social structures, which surround individuals, give guidance to individual lives. It is argued that individualization means individuals are less embedded in social structures such as class, religion and traditions. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that in modern, individualized societies, individuals are increasingly faced with decisions about their own life course; the ‘standard biography’ has been replaced by a ‘do-it-yourself biography’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Structurally individualized people are no longer members of trade unions and churches, and are no longer integrated into the traditional political system.² The ultimate consequence is that what people experience, what risks they run and the position they take up in society are no longer structurally predetermined facts. Rather, these become highly individualized and may differ from individual to individual, from situation to situation (Beck, 1997; see also Predelli and Cebulla, 2011).

According to this line of thought the disembedding of individuals out of once influential institutions such as class, religion and politics has swept away all traditional grounds underlying collective political and socioeconomic values. As a consequence people will have to make their own strictly individual and highly volatile choices. This also affects their opinions on the welfare state (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). As a result, individualization theorist Beck (1997: 144) argues, interests, opinions and conflict issues are increasingly fragmented. Beck and Willms (2004: 107) argue: ‘Society can no longer look in the mirror and see social classes. The mirror has been smashed and all we have left are the individualized fragments.’

Whereas power resources theorists often claim that the welfare state was built on certain interest groups having enough political power resources to build (Korpi, 1983) and maintain a welfare state (Brooks and Manza, 2007), it is evident that an increasing fragmentation of risks, interests and opinions will shatter these interest groups and will ultimately lead to a crisis in welfare state legitimacy. The consequence is that people in lower socioeconomic positions, who potentially run high socioeconomic risks, no longer translate this into pro-welfare state opinions, as power resource theory supposes.

While both ideas, of cultural and structural individualization, are brought together under the nominator of individualization, and both processes can be seen to be contributing to a crisis in welfare state legitimacy, they are seldom related to one another (see for an exception Pakulski and Waters, 1996), especially in empirical research (Elchardus, 2009). As Beck notes: ‘Individualization can no longer be understood as a mere subjective reality which has to be confronted with objective class analysis. Because individualization not only affects the Überbau – ideology, false consciousness – but also the economic Unterbau of “real classes” … [it] is becoming the social structure of … society itself’ (Beck and Beck Gernsheim, 2002: xxii). In this article, we investigate whether individualism leads to more negative opinions on the welfare state, and whether it is true that for cultural and structural individualists alike socioeconomic risks no longer translate into support for the welfare state.

In the following, we discuss the current state of research on welfare state support and individualization and put forward some hypotheses. These will be then tested in the next section.

Hypotheses on individualization, socioeconomic risks and solidarity

Structural and cultural individualization and support for the welfare state

A central idea in Beck’s risk society is that risks are radically individualized and are no longer concentrated among the unhappy few. Risks have, thus, become more pervasive throughout society, are decreasingly detached from class position and these new risks cannot be contained with traditional collective and highly standardized means such as the welfare state. From this we hypothesize that people who are structurally individualized do not value the welfare state very much. However, people who are still highly embedded should be proponents of the welfare state. In this article, we investigate these hypotheses for the Netherlands. As in most western countries in the Netherlands there is a process of structural individualization going on – in the Netherlands most notably visible in the processes of depillarization since the 1950s (Middendorp, 1991), of secularization (Achterberg et al., 2009), of declining union membership (Visser, 2011) and of a more general process of detraditionalization, meaning decreasing membership of churches, trade unions and political parties (De Beer, 2007). Whether or not this ongoing structural individualization really leads to declining welfare state support is still an empirical open-ended question.

As is the case with structural individualism, several studies focusing on cultural individualization within western societies have shown that there is most definitely a shift towards cultural individualism going on (Inglehart, 1997; Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). It may be expected that this rise of cultural individualization will go together with lower levels of support for the welfare state. In a study of 43 countries, Inglehart (1997) shows that in countries where individual freedom is high on the political agenda, support for welfare state intervention and expansion is much lower than in other countries (Inglehart, 1997). However, to conclude from this macro-level evidence that the rise of cultural individualism goes together with lower levels of welfare legitimacy is, for three reasons, a bridge to far.

First, Inglehart himself shows that people who can be classified as postmaterialists, and who greatly value individual freedom, are more inclined to vote for traditionally leftist parties such as socialist or social democratic parties (Inglehart, 1977, 1997; see also Achterberg and Houtman, 2006). These parties are traditional supporters of the welfare state. That these cultural individualists are in favour of parties that are generally seen as pro-welfare state sheds a new light on the alleged anti-welfarism of these individualists.

Second, a study by Erickson and Laycock (2002) among the members of the Canadian Social Democratic Party shows that a preference for socialism and decommodification is much more prevalent among individualists. The mere fact that individualism exists among the members of a social democratic party underscores the fact that individualism does not necessarily lead to less support for the welfare state. The fact that even among these social democrats individualism leads to more support, implies that it is not self-evident that cultural individualism leads to less support for the welfare state.

Third, a recent study by Achterberg et al. (2013) shows that Dutch cultural individualists are more supportive of a generous welfare state, and less supportive of welfare state reforms than cultural collectivists. They argue, following Houtman et al. (2008), that welfare beneficiaries are increasingly seen as people with more or less ‘deviant’ lifestyles. Cultural individualists who are more tolerant of deviant lifestyles tend therefore to be more lenient towards welfare beneficiaries and to the welfare state itself, whereas cultural collectivists, emphasizing conformity and order, are not. In other words, they find the exact opposite from what is expected, which gives rise to the expectation that cultural individualists are, in fact, more in favour of the welfare state than cultural collectivists.

Individualization, the death of class and welfare state support

Although Inglehart’s work is primarily focused on describing cultural changes, he, like Beck, suggests that the risks of life become incalculable through the process of modernization – and that ironically enough, the concern with social risks has increased dramatically (Inglehart, 1997: 36). Yet, like Beck, he claims that this growing concern for risks mainly concerns so-called new, ecological or quality of life risks, and not the old bread-and-butter type of risks (loss of property, income and jobs). ‘According to this diagnosis’, Inglehart claims, ‘the distributional conflicts over goods that characterized industrial society have given way’ (Inglehart, 1997: 36).³ This suggests that there are two marked expectations of highly (structural and/or cultural) individualized people. The first is that they no longer have any clearly defined values about their socioeconomic faiths. The second is that for the highly individualized, socioeconomic risks no longer translate themselves automatically into welfare state support. We elaborate on both expectations.

First, the idea of ‘fluidization’ (Bauman, 2000) resonates in the writings of influential theorists of political behaviour as well. According to these theorists, political behaviour, political values and public opinion have become increasingly unpredictable. They argue that people increasingly formulate their political ideas without taking their own social risks and class position into account (Rose and McAllister, 1986). In a similar vein, Pakulski and Waters (1996) write about the rise of ‘choice politics’ –based purely on individual choice, which is no longer guided by any social factor. Western publics are said to become ‘fluid’, ‘wobbling’ or ‘adrift’ (Andeweg, 1982). As ‘old collective identities of class have been displaced by newer modes of self-identity’ (Savage, 2001: 79), and individualized people are said to have their own fragmented ideological profiles, this suggests that collective ideals of welfare state support no longer occupy a clearly defined ideological dimension for those who are most (structurally and or culturally) individualized. In the words of Atkinson, highly individualized people are individuals who: ‘in their quest for self-realization flit between attitudes, activities and goods like bees in search of pollen’ (Atkinson, 2007: 362).

The second expectation is that for highly individualized people the socioeconomic risks they encounter no longer translate into clearly defined opinions about welfare state protection. Various authors (e.g. Hechter, 2004; Pakulski and Waters, 1996; Turner, 1988) have argued that the concept of ‘social class’ in its traditional economic sense is thus no longer a valid sociological indicator to describe and explain human behaviour (for them, class is dead). Accordingly, one’s position on the labour market, and one’s economic position supposedly are losing grip on the lives of people in postindustrial society. Although this thought keeps on resonating in the writings of several contemporary sociologists, surprisingly little effort has been undertaken to investigate empirically whether it is actually true that social class is less able to organize and structure the political views of individuals.

One of the most frequently used explanations of support for the welfare state is ‘economic’ (Gilens, 1995; Lipset, 1960; Van Oorschot, 2002) or ‘primitive’ (Campbell et al., 1960) self-interest. The explanation is straightforward and fairly simple. Those in precarious socioeconomic positions, and those experiencing the greatest risk of becoming unemployed, impoverished and so on, tend to benefit more from redistributive welfare state policies than those in stronger socioeconomic positions.⁴ Traditionally, support for the welfare state is, as Svallfors (1999: 203) argues ‘[o]ne of the most important arenas for contemporary class politics’. Indeed, people in precarious socioeconomic positions tend to support economic redistribution, government intervention in the economy and a strong and substantial welfare state more than those in favourable economic positions (Lipset, 1981). Svallfors comments: ‘people who by virtue of their greater assets are the market winners will look upon the market’s transactions as more legitimate and be less inclined to redress [the] market’s distributions than those who wield less power upon the market’ (Svallfors, 2007: 189). The fact that those in precarious economic positions have always been the main constituencies of socialist and leftist parties confirms the empirical tenability of this idea (Alford, 1967; Nieuwbeerta, 1996). Those in precarious socioeconomic positions, and those running socioeconomic risks tend to vote for leftist parties in order to redistribute scarce and valuable resources from the haves to themselves, the have-nots, in order to achieve more economic equality (Achterberg, 2006; Achterberg and Houtman, 2009).

The strength of one’s economic position is therefore directly related to one’s ideological values about economic (in)equality, redistribution and welfare state support (Middendorp, 1991; Svallfors, 1991). Where people have weaker economic positions, they tend to adhere to an egalitarian ideology (De Witte, 1997; Marshall et al., 1988; Svallfors, 1991; Wright, 1985). For those in stronger economic positions, the reverse is true – they support laissez-faire values and instead of a strong and expensive welfare state they support market liberalism.

It is questionable whether the process of individualization has caused a decline in the linkage between one’s socioeconomic position and how one thinks about the welfare state. Svallfors (1999) for instance has shown that the class differences in welfare state support have not declined at all. Moreover, in systematic empirical research Elchardus (2009) has shown that the influence of one’s social background on opinions on the welfare state has increased instead of declined – a remarkable finding given the background of ongoing cultural and structural individualization. It is thus again an empirical question how individualized people link the socioeconomic risks they run to support for the welfare state.

Hypotheses

Various scholars have linked the process of individualization to a decline in welfare state legitimacy. In the opening section, we distinguished two types of individualization: cultural and structural individualization. The former is concerned with a growing emphasis on individual freedom, the latter with a growing detachment of individuals from their institutional environment. Following Inglehart, we should expect to find that culturally individualized people do not support the welfare state (hypothesis 1). Following Beck, we should expect to find the same for structurally individualized people (hypothesis 2). Both perspectives on individualization claim that preferences about political issues are becoming increasingly individualized traits. This should thus lead to the expectation that among the highly (culturally and structurally) individualized, welfare values are no longer clearly defined along a single ideological dimension (hypothesis 3). Finally, following the arguments about the death of class, we expect that for (cultural and structural) individualists socioeconomic risks associated with social class are no longer leading to support for the welfare state (hypothesis 4). In what follows, we test these hypotheses using recent data for the Netherlands, one of the most individualized countries in the world.

Data and measures

In order to test the hypotheses proposed above, we used data from the Dutch survey ‘Arbeid, Bedrijf en Sociale Zekerheid’ collected in 2006. The data were collected using a panel from the Centerdata research bureau, which is representative of the Netherlands. A total of 2682 individuals were selected to participate in the study, of which 1972 respondents completed the questionnaire, giving a response rate of 73%. A comparison with official statistics from the Netherlands’ Bureau of Statistics (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) showed that older people, higher income groups and higher educational groups were overrepresented in the sample, which we corrected using a weighting factor.

Cultural individualization was measured using three subscales. First, we used the postmaterialism index. Respondents were asked to indicate which was the most important problem facing our country today: fighting rising prices, maintaining order in the nation, protecting free speech or giving more people a say. Next, respondents were asked to indicate which was the second problem facing our country. From this information we constructed four variables indicating the relative importance of the four issues at hand, those not choosing an issue were assigned a score of 1, those choosing an issue as the second problem were assigned a score of 2, those immediately choosing an issue as their first choice were assigned a score of 3. A factor analysis on these four items revealed that the postmaterialist items (free speech and more say) clustered together, as well as the materialist issues (fighting rising prices and maintaining order). Factor scores were saved to a final scale for postmaterialism. Higher scores on this scale stand for postmaterialism. As the measure for postmaterialism has been criticized (Flanagan, 1987) two other indicators were used to measure cultural individualism: a scale for gender permissiveness and a scale for libertarianism. For the scale for gender permissiveness we asked respondents to indicate whether they agreed (1 ‘totally agree’, 2 ‘agree’, 3 ‘neither agree nor disagree’, 4 ‘disagree’, 5 ‘totally disagree’, 6 ‘don’t know’) with the following statements: ‘In a firm it is unnatural when women hold a position of authority over men’, ‘After all, boys can be educated more freely than girls’, ‘A woman is more capable of bringing up small children than a man’, ‘A married couple deciding on principles not to have children although there are no medical objections is acceptable’ and ‘It is not as important for a girl to get a good schooling as it is for a boy’. We coded the ‘don’t know’ answers as missing and recoded the third item so that higher scores stand for a rejection of traditional views towards gender roles. A factor analysis on these five items revealed that all items clustered together. Factor scores were saved to a final scale for gender permissiveness. Finally, we also used a seven-item selection from the F-scale by Adorno et al. (1950) to measure libertarianism. We asked the respondents to indicate whether they agreed (1 ‘totally agree’, 2 ‘agree’, 3 ‘neither agree nor disagree’, 4 ‘disagree’, 5 ‘totally disagree’, 6 ‘don’t know’) with the following statements: ‘Young people often revolt against social situations that they find unjust: however, when they get older they ought to become resigned to reality’, ‘What we need are fewer laws and institutions and more courageous, tireless and devoted leaders whom people can trust’, ‘Because of rapid changes it is hard to distinguish good from bad’, ‘There are two sorts of people: the strong and the weak’, ‘Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of the immoral, crooked and feebleminded people’, ‘If people would talk less and work harder, everything would be better’ and ‘Because of the many opinions on good and bad, it is not clear what is what’. A factor analysis on these seven items revealed that all items clustered together. Reversed factor scores were saved to a final scale for libertarianism. Table 1 reports on the secondary factor analysis on the three subscales. Higher scores for the factor loadings stand for a clearer cut representation of each subscale in the latent ideological dimension of cultural individualism. It shows that a scale tapping into cultural individualism can be constructed out of these subscales (cf. Houtman, 2003). Higher scores on this scale, which was created by saving factor scores, stand for more cultural individualism.

Table 1.

Factor analysis for cultural individualism.

	Factor loadings
Postmaterialism	.60
Gender permissiveness	.68
Libertarianism	.77
Eigenvalue	1.42
R²	.47
N	1899

As discussed earlier, we chose to measure structural individualization as the disembeddedness of three central institutions: religion, class and politics. Religious disembeddedness was measured by asking whether the respondent is a member of a religious denomination (1 = no, 0 = yes). Class disembeddednes was measured by asking whether or not one has much confidence in the trade unions (1 = no, 0 = yes). Political disembeddedness was measured by asking whether one intends to vote next time (1 = no, 0 = yes). Factor analysis on these three indicators revealed one scale could be constructed – higher scores on this scale stand for more structural individualism.

Support for the welfare state was measured using three subscales. The first taps into the respondents’ values pertaining to privatization. Respondents were asked five questions about their thoughts whether insurances against unemployment, incapacity to work, ageing, losing one’s spouse and sickness should be a (1) government responsibility, or should be (5) an individual responsibility. Factor analysis on these five items showed that a scale measuring a preference for privatization could be constructed. A second subscale for deservingness is constructed using 31 items asking the respondents whether he or she thinks a social category like mothers on social assistance, or poor people, or foreigners are entitled to welfare support. Again, factor analysis showed that a scale for the degree to which respondents classify these social categories as deserving could be constructed. Lastly, a third subscale covering support for social security was constructed. We used six items, on a scale from 1, ‘disagree completely’ to 5, ‘agree completely’. The items were: ‘I would gladly take care of my own social insurance’, ‘Changes in social security may not cost me anything’, ‘Especially those with low incomes profit from the system of social security’, ‘Receiving social benefits is something to be ashamed about’, ‘If you look at it carefully, you’ll see that everybody profits from the social security system’ and ‘For a sufficient social security system I would gladly pay more than I do right now’.⁵ Again, factor analysis showed that a scale of support for social security could be constructed.

Table 2 reports on the secondary factor analysis on the three subscales. Higher (positive or negative) scores for the factor loadings stand for a clearer cut representation of each subscale in the latent ideological dimension of support for the welfare state. It shows that a scale tapping into welfare state support could be constructed – higher scores on this scale stand for more positive views on the welfare state

Table 2.

Factor analysis for welfare support.

	Factor loadings
Privatization	−.78
Social security support	.68
Deservingness	.76
Eigenvalue	1.65
R²	.54
N	1639

To measure socioeconomic insecurity we used five indicators. Education was measured as the number of years of schooling needed to obtain the respondents’ educational level. Second, we measured unemployment by asking whether a respondent was unemployed at that moment (1 ‘not unemployed’, 2 ‘underemployed’, 3 ‘totally unemployed’). Third, we measured the income by asking the respondents into which of four categories their monthly net household income fell: (1) €1150 or less, (2) €1151–1800, (3) €1801–2600 and (4) €2601 or more. Fourth, to measure unemployment risk we asked the respondents to indicate whether they thought there was a chance of losing their job within the next 12 months (1 ‘no chance at all’, through 5 ‘very high chance’). Finally, to measure welfare dependency we asked the respondents a series of eight questions on whether they were dependent on social assistance, unemployment benefits, incapacity benefits, old-age pensions and so on (0 = no, 1 = yes). The answers to these questions were summed to give an indication of the degree to which the respondent is depending on welfare.

Results

First, we investigated the degree to which cultural and structural individualism are associated with welfare state support. In Table 3 we present the correlations of both types of individualization with support for the welfare state in two ways: we calculated zero-order relationships and using OLS regression we tested whether these relationships remained significant if controlled for each other and some economic control variables.

Table 3.

Individualism and welfare state support (Pearson’s r).

	Pearson’s r	Beta
Cultural individualism	.33**	.33**
Structural individualism	−.16**	.17**
Education	–	−.05*
Income	–	−.04*
Unemployment risk	–	.02
Unemployment	–	.07*
Welfare dependency	–	.09**
R²	–	.15
N	1604	1600

p < .05; **p < .01.

Two conclusions can be drawn from these first results – the first is that cultural individualism does not lead to less support for the welfare state. This leads to a rejection of the first hypothesis. Yet, this does not mean that all sorts of individualization lead to more support for the welfare state. Following Beck, we expected to find low levels of support among structurally individualized people. This hypothesis is confirmed, although it must be noted that compared to the stronger effects of cultural individualism the effect of structural individualism is rather modest.

So, since both types of individualism render radically different effects on welfare support, we cannot say that individualism drives lower welfare state support – structural individualism does, whereas cultural individualism doesn’t. This means that individuals who ‘feel’ free are more supportive, whereas individuals who ‘are’ free are less supportive.

Next, postmodern accounts would have us believe that political ideological values pertaining to the ‘good old’ welfare state are no longer grounded in a solid, collective nature. Here we aim to test this idea by determining whether welfare state ideology is highly scattered among individualists. In Table 4, we perform a factor analysis (also performed in Table 1) for three groups: those who score low, those who score intermediary and those scoring high on cultural individualization. Following the third hypothesis we should expect to find a less coherently ordered value pattern for highly individualized individuals – which should hence amount to lower factor loadings and lower eigenvalues (indicating less structure). In fact, following the hypothesis we should expect to find that for highly individualized respondents there is no clear cut ideological dimension underlying responses to the three subscales – amounting in factor loadings close to 0, and an eigenvalue close to 1.

Table 4.

The association between the four support scales for three categories.

	Low CI	Medium CI	High CI
Privatization	−.80	−.78	−.75
Social security support	.61	.66	.73
Deservingness	.75	.75	.76
Eigenvalue	1.56	1.62	1.72
R²	.52	.54	.58
N	646	532	460

Following the third hypothesis, we expected to find no clear value pattern among the individualists (those scoring high on cultural individualism). Yet, when the collectivists (those scoring low on cultural individualism) are compared to the individualists, we find the exact opposite – a more coherently defined ideological outlook on welfare instead of less, which refutes this expectation. In Table 5, the same is done for structural collectivists and individualists.

Table 5.

The association between the four support scales for three categories.

	Low SI	Medium SI	High SI
Privatization	−.78	−.79	−.78
Social security support	.67	.73	.70
Deservingness	.76	.73	.76
Eigenvalue	1.63	1.69	1.69
R²	.54	.56	.56
N	795	413	300

Again, there is no evidence for decreased ideological conflict about welfare within the category of the structural individualists – definitely refuting the third hypothesis. Instead, both Tables 4 and 5 show that conflict about welfare support is most profound among the highly individualized. This means that values pertaining to the welfare state are very coherently organized among our individualized respondents and not so much among our collectivist ones.

Next, we want to know whether and how these welfare values are linked to the socioeconomic risks people endure. In Table 6, we show the results of a linear regression analysis split into three categories based on the degree of cultural individualization. The basic hypothesis is that for individualists there is no marked influence of these socioeconomic risks (class risks) on the way people think about the welfare state. The last column indicates whether the effects between the groups are getting stronger (++ / moving away from zero) or weaker (− − / moving towards zero) with ongoing individualization.

Table 6.

Cultural individualization, socioeconomic risks and solidarity (OLS regression, betas shown, method is enter, pairwise deletion).

Cultural individualization	Low CI	Medium CI	High CI	Effect increase(+)/decrease (−)
Education	−.03	−.06*	−.10**	++
Income	−.09*	−.08*	−.09*	+/−
Unemployment risk	.09*	.01	.02	− −
Unemployment	.06	.08*	.15**	++
Welfare dependency	.00	.16**	.16**	+
R²	.02	.05	.07	++
N	646	530	460

From Table 6 the conclusion can be drawn that for collectivists who are low on cultural individualism there is hardly a link between the social risks they run and their opinion on the welfare state – we only find that people with low incomes and people high on unemployment risk are supportive of the welfare state. Moreover, most effects of these structural variables tend to grow in strength as cultural individualism grows – strikingly rejecting our last hypothesis. For cultural individualists we find the best explanatory model – people with lower levels of education and income, unemployed people and people dependent on welfare are more supportive of the welfare state. From these findings the conclusion may be drawn that for cultural individualism we find the opposite to what was expected: those experiencing social risks favour the welfare state more.

For structural individualization we do find confirmation for our hypothesis (see Table 7). For structural individualists we hardly find an effect of social background. Remarkably enough we find that the higher educated individualists are more supportive of the welfare state – a striking contradiction to the main class paradigm that those experiencing more social risks will be more supportive of the welfare state. Moreover, we find the strongest linkage between social background and support for the welfare state for the collectivists. As expected, those high on unemployment risk, unemployed and those dependent on welfare are more supportive.

Table 7.

Structural individualization, socioeconomic risks and solidarity (OLS regression, betas shown, method is enter, pairwise deletion).

Structural individualization	Low SI	Medium SI	High SI	Effect increase(+)/decrease (−)
Education	−.04	−.02	.09*	+
Income	−.02	.03	−.05	+/−
Unemployment risk	.08*	.00	.04	−
Unemployment	.07*	–.04	−.06	−
Welfare dependency	.17**	.08*	.08*	−
R²	.05	.01	.02	−
N	793	413	300

In short, for cultural individualism our fourth hypothesis needs to be rejected, and for structural individualism it can be accepted. For cultural individualists we find that socioeconomic insecurities and risks play an important role for welfare state support, for structural individualists these risks play no important role whatsoever.

Summary and conclusions

For various reasons the process of individualization has continuously been supposed to be linked to a decline in welfare state support. It is commonly argued that individualization causes a decline in people’s appreciation of a collectively organized welfare. In this article we studied whether individualists really support the welfare state less than collectivists. Distinguishing between two types of individualism, we found that people who are structurally disembedded from their institutional environment – the structural individualists – do indeed not support the welfare state. Moreover, for these structural individualists, the socioeconomic risks they run and their actual class position do not translate into support for the welfare state. Put differently, structural individualists do not support the welfare state, irrespective of their socioeconomic interests. Resonating with suggestions within the current death of class debate – in which class is proclaimed dead or a ‘zombie category’ at best (Beck, 2002: 37; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 203–204) – their vulnerable socioeconomic position does not lead these structural individualists to support the welfare state.

Contrary to this, we found that people who can be classified as cultural individualists – those who emphasize individuality – are more supportive of the welfare state. For these cultural individualists we also found that their socioeconomic position and interests influence the way they think about the welfare state. Cultural individualists hence are more supportive of the welfare state, and especially so for those with weak socioeconomic positions.

Whereas these findings clearly contradict pessimistic accounts concerning individualism and welfare state legitimacy, they do beg for an alternative explanation as to why these cultural individualists support the welfare state. Since cultural individualists emphasize their individuality, they may also have come to think that they are socioeconomically vulnerable as they are not collectively protected. As a compensation for their increased sense of vulnerability, and stemming from their self-interest, these individualists are more supportive of a collective protective system of social security (cf. Castells, 1996; Dekker, 2008; Giddens, 1998). Yet, cultural individualists may also support the welfare state for another reason. As other research has frequently shown that cultural individualists are more inclined to support socially marginal groups such as immigrants (Scheepers et al., 1990) and those dependent on welfare (Houtman et al., 2008), the reasons for them to support the welfare state may also be rooted in their altruistic concern for others. Future research could elaborate on this more, and try to find out why cultural individualists are more inclined to support the welfare state than collectivists.

In sum, individualization is like a double-edged sword. Structural individualization is on the one hand causing a decrease in welfare legitimacy. Cultural individualization, on the other hand, is having the reversed effect – it leads to more welfare state legitimacy. Because both individualization processes are occurring simultaneously, and more or less cancel each other out, no important changes in welfare state legitimacy are expected to occur because of individualization.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Peter Achterberg is Associate Professor at the Centre for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology (CROCUS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include processes of political, cultural and religious change.

Judith Raven is postdoctoral research fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests include (popular support for) welfare state reforms and collective risk protection through industrial relations.

Romke van der Veen is Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include institutional change of welfare states and the implementation of social policies.

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