Do institutions matter? The interplay between income benefit design,popular perceptions,and the social legitimacy of targeted welfare

Abstract

A recurring theme in welfare state research is that public support for social welfare is related to the institutional design of welfare policies. However, strong empirical evidence for the institutional embeddedness of welfare attitudes has been lacking to date, and the underlying theoretical mechanisms remain underexplored. This article diverges from the widespread macro-perspective of welfare regime theory, by shifting the focus of its analysis from countries to income benefit schemes within the heterogeneous welfare context of the Netherlands. Based on the 2006 Welfare Opinions Survey, results show that the institutional design of three differently organized benefit schemes (the people’s pension, workers’ unemployment insurance and social assistance) is meaningfully related to popular perceptions of self-interest, programme performance and welfare deservingness. These intermediate perceptions, in turn, appear to have a significant impact on the social legitimacy of welfare allocation to the target groups of the schemes: pensioners, unemployed people and social assistance recipients.

Keywords

Institutions legitimacy public opinion The Netherlands welfare policy

Introduction

The idea of a close connection between welfare institutions and welfare attitudes is well-entrenched and well-researched in welfare state literature. However, two important lacunae remain. The first is that existing empirical research struggles to discern a clear-cut institutional embeddedness of welfare opinions (Bean and Papadakis, 1998; Gelissen, 2001; Svallfors, 2003). One possible argument for this apparent non-relationship is that the bird’s-eye view of the dominant welfare regime approach (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999) is simply not up to the task. Regime theorists have traditionally set out to ‘understand the big picture’ and not to ‘dwell on the detailed characteristics of the various social programs’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 2). As a result, the large institutional heterogeneity within national welfare systems has often been neglected (Boldersen and Mabett, 1995; Forma, 1997). Most real-world welfare states encompass a mixture of different types of income benefit schemes, and possibly individual attitudes correlate more strongly with the meso-level schemes that are part of people’s daily life than with macro-level regimes that exist mainly as theoretical constructs in academic writings. The second lacuna is that the precise explanatory mechanisms connecting macro-level (or meso-level) institutions to micro-level attitudes remain underexplored (Larsen, 2006; Raven, 2012). This article aims to improve our current understanding of the institutions–attitudes nexus by addressing both lacunae in a theoretical model, which postulates that the link between the institutional design of an income benefit and its social legitimacy is mediated by three types of popular perceptions. In doing so, the present study’s contribution to the literature is twofold. First, it places income benefits instead of welfare regimes at the core of its analytical framework. Second, it attempts to open the ‘black box’ between welfare institutions and welfare attitudes.

The theoretical model is displayed in Figure 1, which serves as a blueprint of the article. As shown in the left-hand side of the figure, the model distinguishes three possible institutional designs which a particular income benefit scheme may have. These designs correspond to the three major ideal-typical social security constellations found in present-day Europe: citizenship-based universal benefits, contribution-based social insurance and poverty-based social assistance (Clasen, 1997; Clasen and Van Oorschot, 2002; Kvist and Ploug, 1996). The model continues with the assumption that the programmatic structure of a benefit scheme has an impact on popular perceptions surrounding that scheme, that is, on the subjective evaluations made by a citizen, which may or may not concur with objective conditions. Previous work suggests three types of popular perceptions are of particular relevance: self-interest, programme performance and welfare deservingness (Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017). The first concerns the personal stake citizens perceive they have in an income benefit scheme. How beneficial do they think a programme is to them? The second type refers to people’s evaluations of a scheme’s performance. How complex, costly, effective, efficient and fair is the implementation of a welfare policy considered to be? The third type relates to people’s perceptions of welfare deservingness. Which deservingness criteria should matter in determining who gets what from a welfare scheme? These popular perceptions, in turn, influence the social legitimacy of targeted welfare, which is defined here as the degree to which the general public feels that the government ought to be responsible for allocating welfare resources to a specific target group (Ringen, 1987; Roller, 1995; Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017).

Figure 1.

Conceptual model: The interplay between income benefit design, popular perceptions and the social legitimacy of targeted welfare.

The article comprises four sections. In the first, the theoretical model is specified further and applied to three income benefit schemes in the Dutch context. This leads us to specific hypotheses about (a) how the particular institutional design of Dutch income benefit X targeted at group Y is associated with the popular perceptions concerning benefit X and (b) how these perceptions, in turn, influence the degree of public support for social welfare targeted at group Y. The second section explains the methodological choices made in order to test these hypotheses. To unravel the interplay between benefit design, popular perceptions and welfare legitimacy, data from the 2006 Dutch Welfare Opinions Survey is used. The third section reports the results of descriptive and regression analyses. The final section concludes and identifies some shortcomings and suggestions for future research.

The interplay between benefit design, popular perceptions and the social legitimacy of targeted welfare in a Dutch context

The Dutch income benefits system

The Dutch income benefits system consists of three pillars that each represents one of the three often distinguished ideal-typical benefits of contribution-based social insurance, citizenship-based universal benefits and poverty-based social assistance (Clasen, 1997; Clasen and Van Oorschot, 2002). Although there have been several rounds of welfare state transformations since the 1980s¹ in the Netherlands (Raven, 2012; Van Oorschot, 2006b; Yerkes, 2011), its three-pillar income benefits system has remained intact, and the basic institutional structure of the three income benefits under examination has not undergone major change. The first pillar comprises income benefits that are organized by way of contribution-based workers’ insurance that covers the risks of unemployment, disability and short-term illness. In the case of unemployment, for instance, those who have contributed sufficiently to the mandatory insurance system through paid work are, regardless of their actual needs, entitled to receive financial compensation from unemployment insurance. To gain access to this Bismarckian type of social insurance, claimants are required to prove a certain minimum number of working days during the period preceding their claim. The benefit level depends on previous work history and wages, with the simple rule of thumb being that higher contributions in terms of work record duration and wage level give rise to higher benefits, within the limits of pre-determined minima and maxima. The insurance contributions are a fixed percentage of wages, so that a higher absolute amount is paid when the wage is higher. The second pillar contains universal, citizenship-based people’s insurances that aim to provide an income to all Dutch citizens for social contingencies such as old age or having children. The Dutch state pension scheme, Algemene Ouderdomswet (AOW), for example, is a mandatory, contributory programme covering all inhabitants of the Netherlands, irrespective of their actual needs or work history. The benefit level depends on the years of residence, with each year rendering 2 percent of a basic flat-rate pension, meaning that a person who has been a Dutch citizen for at least 50 years will receive 100 percent of the flat-rate maximum pension level.² Contributions are paid as a percentage of taxed income from work and all other sources. One could also argue that the Dutch citizens’ pension is a Beveridgean type of social insurance, since it is financed from contributions. However, in our view, the Dutch people’s pension is closer to the ideal-typical universal, citizenship-based type of benefit, given that it targets all citizens instead of only workers, and having paid any contributions is not a prerequisite for benefit receipt. The third and final pillar is a non-contributory, poverty-based social assistance scheme that functions as a residual safety net to guarantee that no Dutch citizen falls below the pre-defined subsistence level. Dutch social assistance is highly selective, in that means testing is employed to restrict benefit access to those who can demonstrate financial distress. Social assistance is funded by general taxes and the maximum benefit level is equal to the minimum wage.

The interplay between income benefit design, popular perceptions and the social legitimacy of targeted welfare

Existing literature distinguishes three theoretical rationales that connect welfare institutions with welfare legitimacy (Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017), from which we have deduced the three types of mediating popular perceptions used in our theoretical model. The first rationale, stemming from rational institutionalism, is that institutions matter because they influence citizens’ perceived self-interest in and thus support for social welfare (Blomberg and Kroll, 1999; Pierson, 1994, 2001; Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017). Accordingly, the most popular welfare arrangements are simply those that bring the greatest good to the greatest number. The second rationale holds that the social legitimacy of a welfare policy is linked to its perceived performance. Better functioning social policies (on crucial dimensions such as efficiency or fairness), it is argued, are also perceived to perform better by the citizenry, and thus yield higher levels of popular acceptance (Blomberg and Kroll, 1999; Rothstein, 1998; Svallfors, 2013; Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017). The third rationale, inspired by normative institutionalism, is that institutions also embody certain rules and norms to which citizens adapt their moral beliefs and policy preferences (Mau, 2004; Rothstein, 1998). This normative approach to welfare state legitimacy is perhaps most prominently advanced by Larsen (2006), who claims that institutional characteristics of welfare policies (such as the degree of universality) are linked to public discussions and popular perceptions of the welfare deservingness of benefit recipients, which in turn adversely affect popular commitment to welfare provision.

Most existing literature concerning the institutions–attitudes nexus primarily contrasts citizenship-based universal policies with poverty-based selective policies, on the dimensions of self-interest, programme performance and welfare deservingness, thereby leaving contribution-based workers’ insurance more or less out of the analytical picture. There seems to be relatively large scholarly agreement with the hypothesis that citizenship-based universal income benefits have higher levels of public support than poverty-based selective benefits. However, the theoretical arguments underlying this thesis differ markedly. The ‘interest-related’ argument is that universal policies are, in contrast with more-selective ones, targeted at larger segments of the population, and citizens – especially the middle classes – believe that they are more likely to benefit from and thus support universal policies (Blomberg and Kroll, 1999; Forma, 1997; Goodin and Le Grand, 1987; Kangas, 1995; Korpi and Palme, 1998; Sachweh et al., 2007). Contribution-based social insurance might take a middle position on the dimension of perceived self-interest because its welfare clientele group – consisting of the insured working population (and occasionally spouses and/or children) – is commonly larger than that of poverty-based policies yet smaller than that of citizenship-based policies. Applied to the Dutch context, the expectation is that

H1a. Citizens’ perceived self-interest is highest regarding the people’s pension, lowest regarding the social assistance scheme and in between regarding workers’ unemployment insurance.

In line with mainstream literature about welfare attitudes (Gelissen, 2001; Jaeger, 2006), we also assume that perceived self-interest has a positive effect on people’s support for welfare provision, regardless of the target group under consideration:

H1b. The higher citizens’ perceived self-interest in an income benefit scheme, the more strongly they will support the allocation of social welfare to its target group.

The ‘performance-related’ argument claims that highly selective policies are, particularly in the case of means testing, administratively more complex, more costly and more susceptible to benefit fraud than highly universal policies because they simply have ‘more (eligibility) rules to break’. Consequently, citizens might also believe poverty-based benefit schemes perform worse than citizenship-based universal benefit schemes, which would therefore make them less popular among the public (Rothstein, 1998, 2001; Roosma et al., 2016, 2014). Contribution-based social insurance often has similarly complex administrative rules to determine who is entitled to what (Boldersen and Mabett, 1995). It may thus be the case that it is perceived to be as dysfunctional as poverty-based benefits. Nevertheless, the expectation for the Dutch welfare setting is that

H2a. Citizens perceive the people’s pension to perform better (in terms of complexity, efficiency, effectivity, fairness and societal cost) than workers’ unemployment insurance, which in turn is perceived to perform better than the social assistance scheme.

In line with Rothstein’s (1998) suggestion that in order for welfare policy to be legitimate, people must perceive the implementation of that policy to be cheap, fair, simple, efficient and effective, we anticipate that

H2b. The better an income benefit scheme is perceived to perform by citizens (in terms of its complexity, efficiency, effectivity, fairness and societal cost), the more they will support the allocation of social welfare to its target group.

The ‘deservingness-related’ argument builds on the theory of welfare deservingness, which suggests that people’s welfare preferences are informed by five crucial deservingness criteria: control, attitude, reciprocity, identity and need (Van Oorschot, 2006a; Van Oorschot and Roosma, 2017). Unfortunately, data limitations (see the methodology section) restrict our hypotheses and analyses to the criteria of reciprocity and need.³ Reciprocity refers to the idea that target groups with higher perceived contributions to society in the past, present or future are more deserving of welfare support in the public’s eye. Need denotes the assumption that target groups with higher perceived (financial) need are judged to be more deserving of welfare support. According to Larsen (2006), universal policies have higher levels of public support because they supposedly blur the line between ‘us’ (the better-off benefactors) and ‘them’ (the poor beneficiaries) (Rothstein, 1998), thereby making discussions about welfare deservingness more or less irrelevant to the general public. Poverty-based selective policies, on the other hand, must assess, among other things, whether benefit claimants are ‘poor enough’ to be eligible and whether they do not have themselves to blame for their predicament. Although Larsen (2006: 9) suggests that the built-in insurance mechanism of contribution-based social insurance might ‘suppress the deservingness discussion even more than a universal programmatic structure’ (see also Goldschmidt, 2015), its contributory nature may place the criterion of reciprocity at the heart of public deservingness debates (Reeskens and Van der Meer, 2017). After all, social insurance schemes are organized in such a way that only those who have made contributions to the system are entitled to receive benefits from it. Accordingly, when deciding who should get what from the Dutch workers’ unemployment insurance, claimants’ prior work history and paid insurance premiums are presumably important considerations in the mind of the citizen. In Dutch social assistance, on the other hand, the criterion of need might be stressed most by citizens, as the programme is targeted at members of the population who fall below the agreed-upon subsistence level. The universal nature of the Dutch pension system might close all discussions on recipients’ fulfilment of the deservingness criteria (Larsen, 2006), which implies that citizens do not emphasize any criteria in expressing their opinions on pensions. However, as the Dutch state pension is also contributory, the criterion of reciprocity might nonetheless find some resonance among the public. Based on the idea that citizens echo the normative principles embedded within the institutional design of a benefit scheme, we expect that

H3a. The reciprocity criterion is emphasized most by citizens with regard to workers’ unemployment insurance, least with regard to the social assistance scheme, and somewhere in between with regard to the people’s pension.

H4a. The need criterion is emphasized more strongly by citizens regarding the social assistance scheme than the people’s pension and workers’ unemployment insurance.

Implicit in Larsen’s (2006) institutional line of reasoning is the notion that deservingness perceptions are negatively related to public support for social welfare, as more intensive public deservingness discussions are claimed to foster lower levels of welfare state legitimacy. This assumption suggests that

H3b. The more strongly a person feels that an income benefit scheme should be organized according to the criterion of reciprocity, the more they oppose the allocation of social welfare to its target group.

H4b. The more strongly a person feels that an income benefit scheme should be organized according to the criterion of need, the more they oppose the allocation of social welfare to its target group.

Methodology

Data and method

We used data from the Dutch Welfare Opinions Survey in order to test the theoretical hypotheses. This is a large-scale online survey administered in 2006 by CentERdata (n = 1972, participation rate = 73%). The survey is exceptionally fruitful for the current research because it operationalizes people’s support for the allocation of welfare to the three policy target groups under consideration, as well as popular perceptions of self-interest, programme performance and deservingness for each benefit scheme separately. An overview of the different constructs, their question wordings and the matching response scales is given in Appendix 1. As a comparison with national demographic statistics showed that older people, higher income groups and the higher educated are slightly overrepresented in the sample, a weighting procedure was applied to correct for this.

In the first part of the empirical analysis, the theoretical hypotheses concerning the link between income benefit design and popular perceptions are tested by using descriptive statistics. In the second part, three ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models are estimated, in which public support for differently targeted social welfare is explained by popular perceptions. Due to relatively large item nonresponse, missing values were imputed prior to the regression analyses, using the expectation maximization algorithm available in the SPSS software package.⁴ Although the results obtained from models applying the maximization procedure are almost identical to those obtained from models following more conventional methods such as listwise or pairwise deletion, the imputed models are presented because it has been shown that maximum likelihood procedures yield slightly more reliable estimates (Schafer and Graham, 2002). As a robustness check, models controlling for several relevant background variables – such as age, gender and income – were also estimated. The results from these models did not differ substantially from the results obtained from models without such controls.

Dependent variables

The three dependent variables, measuring the social legitimacy of welfare allocation to different policy target groups, are assessed by items asking to what extent respondents feel, on a scale from 1 to 10, that society should grant pensioners/unemployed people/social assistance beneficiaries the right to financial support, given that public funds are limited. A higher score for such an item means that the respondent is more in favour of welfare provision to the target group in question.

Independent variables

Perceived self-interest in income benefit X is measured as respondents’ self-predicted likelihood of ever personally receiving the benefit, ranging from an estimated probability of 0 to being currently in receipt of it. The perceived performance of benefit X is assessed by five variables that each measure a different component of programme performance.⁵ Perceived benefit fraud (or effectiveness) is measured by asking respondents to estimate the prevalence of pensions/unemployment benefits/social assistance benefits being abused, using three response categories: (a) rarely, (b) sometimes and (c) often. The four remaining indicators of programme performance – complexity, efficiency, fairness and societal cost – are part of a series of items in which respondents are asked to rate, on a 5-point scale, how they feel about the current system of pensions/unemployment benefits/social assistance benefits. The response scale ranges from ‘complicated’ to ‘simple’ for complexity, from ‘poor implementation’ to ‘strong implementation’ for efficiency, from ‘unfair’ to ‘fair’ for fairness, and from ‘costly’ to ‘cheap’ for societal cost. With regard to welfare deservingness perceptions, we attempted to operationalize people’s emphasis on the criteria of reciprocity and need because the data unfortunately lack items by which to measure the criteria of control, identity and attitude. For each benefit scheme, the deservingness criteria are treated as latent concepts measured by multiple manifest items (see Appendix 2 for details of the factor analysis). Higher scores indicate that respondents place a stronger emphasis on the particular deservingness criterion. People’s emphasis on the reciprocity criterion is assessed by asking whether respondents feel that pensions/unemployment benefits/social assistance benefits should be higher (0 = no, 1 = yes) for those people who have, for example, (a) paid higher versus lower contributions, or (b) a longer versus a shorter work history before receiving the benefit. To determine people’s emphasis on the need criterion, respondents are asked whether they feel pensions/unemployment benefits/social assistance benefits should be lower (0 = no, 1 = yes) for those people who have, for example, (a) a partner with income versus a partner without income or (b) a large amount of savings versus little or no savings.

Results

In this section, we empirically examine (a) to what extent popular perceptions of self-interest, programme performance, and welfare deservingness are related to the institutional design of differently organized benefit schemes; and (b) to what extent the social legitimacy of welfare allocation to the target groups of those schemes is shaped by popular perceptions. Dutch citizens appear to be stronger supporters of welfare provision to pensioners than to social assistance recipients and the unemployed. The mean scores of the items asking respondents to what extent society should grant these policy target groups the right to financial support are respectively 7.16 (standard deviation (SD) = 1.82), 6.25 (SD = 1.89), and 6.02 (SD = 1.81). Public support for social welfare targeted at social assistance beneficiaries and the unemployed is thus more or less equal.

Are popular perceptions related to income benefit schemes with a different institutional design?

Table 1 shows that Dutch citizens’ perceived self-interest is, as anticipated (H1a), highest for the universal people’s pension, lowest for social assistance, and moderate for workers’ unemployment insurance, albeit that the difference between the latter two income benefit schemes is of a minimal magnitude. Although this finding seems to confirm the claim of rational institutionalism that the popularity of a benefit scheme depends on the size of its welfare clientele (Pierson, 1994, 2001), some might argue that the apparent relation between institutional design and perceptions of self-interest is in fact a spurious one in the case of the pension scheme. It is possible that citizens’ high(er) perceived personal stake in this scheme is not due to its universal character, but can instead simply be explained by the biological reality that every citizen is destined to grow old, but not to become unemployed or poor (Jensen and Petersen, 2016). However, it is highly likely that large segments of the Dutch population, especially the socioeconomically more affluent strata, would not deem the pension system to be beneficial to them if pensions were targeted only at the poor. In the presence of a poverty-based social assistance system, the level of perceived self-interest might be much lower than that of a citizenship-based people’s pension or a contribution-based workers’ pension (Kangas, 1995).

Table 1.

Popular perceptions of self-interest in, performance of and deservingness criteria for differently organized income benefits.

	Citizenship-based people’s pension	Contribution-based unemployment insurance	Poverty-based social assistance
Perceived self-interest
Likelihood of receiving benefit X	5.13 (SD = 1.67)	2.70 (SD = 1.47)	2.54 (SD = 1.41)
Zero chance (1)–current receipt (7)
Perceived programme performance
Benefit fraud
Rarely	57.9%	6.6%	6.2%
Sometimes	34.7%	47.7%	49.1%
Often	7.4%	45.7%	44.7%
Complexity
Complicated (1)–simple (5)	3.33 (SD = 1.05)	2.76 (SD = 0.87)	2.70 (SD = 0.80)
Efficiency
Inefficient (1)–efficient (5)	3.56 (SD = 0.93)	3.06 (SD = 0.82)	2.85 (SD = 0.78)
Fairness
Unfair (1)–fair (5)	3.69 (SD = 1.00)	3.28 (SD = 0.83)	3.08 (SD = 0.78)
Societal cost
Costly (1)–cheap (5)	2.48 (SD = 0.82)	2.52 (SD = 0.76)	2.47 (SD = 0.79)
Deservingness criteria
Reciprocity
Not important (0)–important (1)For example, should the benefit be higher for those who have paid higher versus those who have paid lower insurance premiums or taxes?	0.41 (SD = 0.43)	0.60 (SD = 0.36)	0.29 (SD = 0.30)
	37.7%	46.6%	17.8%
Need
Not important (0)–important (1)For example, should the benefit be lower for those who have a partner with income versus those who have a partner without income?	0.21 (SD = 0.26)	0.32 (SD = 0.29)	0.46 (SD = 0.29)
	37.9%	59.3%	72.7%

SD: standard deviation.

The values for the example items for the need and reciprocity criteria are the percentages of respondents agreeing with the statements.

Welfare institutions do not only convey to people what is in their best interest, however, but also shape how they are perceived to perform (Rothstein, 1998), and which deservingness criteria are prominent in public welfare discussions (Larsen, 2006). With regard to perceived programme performance, the general pattern seems to be that the pension system is judged to function better than unemployment insurance, which in turn is deemed to perform marginally better than social assistance. While more than half of the respondents are convinced that benefit fraud rarely occurs in the pension system (57.9%), only 6.6 and 6.2 percent respectively believe unemployment insurance and social assistance are virtually free of abuse. Furthermore, on average, Dutch citizens think that the pension scheme is more efficient, fairer, and less complicated than unemployment insurance and social assistance. The average perceived efficiency and fairness of the unemployment scheme is slightly higher than that of social assistance, yet in terms of perceived complexity, there is no substantial difference between the two benefit schemes. A notable exception to the general rule is the perceived societal cost, which is deemed to be more or less equally high for all three income benefits. This finding appears to run counter to the expectation that the pension system would be perceived to perform best. However, given that social expenditure on pensions is much larger than on unemployment insurance and social assistance in the Netherlands (Van Oorschot, 2006b), and that the ageing population is increasingly presented as threatening the financial sustainability of the Dutch welfare state in public discourse, it is quite surprising that the pension system is not perceived to be more costly to society than the other benefit schemes. Against this background, the data does seem to confirm the hypothesis that Dutch citizens perceive the pension system to perform better than the unemployment scheme, which in turn is perceived to function better than the social assistance programme (H2a).

Finally, the link between institutional design and deservingness perceptions is examined. Table 1 shows that the criterion of reciprocity follows the hypothesized pattern in that it appears to be most strongly emphasized when citizens evaluate who should get what from workers’ unemployment insurance, weakest when making deservingness judgements concerning the social assistance scheme, and somewhere in between when considering welfare distribution in the people’s pension system (H3a). For example, whereas nearly half of the respondents agree that unemployment benefits should be higher if claimants have paid higher contributions, only about 18 percent feel that social assistance should be proportional to previously paid taxes. Approximately 38 percent of the respondents believe that pensions should be higher for those who have paid a higher insurance premium. The observed pattern for the need criterion is also in line with expectations (H4a). Need is clearly stressed most strongly for the social assistance scheme, which is accordingly targeted at citizens below the poverty line. Illustrative of the popular preference for organizing social assistance along the lines of the need criterion is the relatively high percentage of respondents (72.7%) agreeing with the statement that social assistance benefit should be lower for claimants who have a partner with income compared with those who have a partner without income. Furthermore, Dutch citizens feel that the criterion of need should play a more important role in unemployment insurance than in the pension system. For example, whereas about 38 percent of the respondents think that the pension should be lower for those who have additional means through their income-generating partner, nearly 60 percent feel that this should be the case for unemployment benefit.

The social legitimacy of targeted welfare explained by popular perceptions

Table 2 displays the results obtained from three OLS regression models explaining the social legitimacy of social welfare targeted at pensioners (model A),⁶ the unemployed (model B), and social assistance beneficiaries (model C). Whereas the standardized slopes (β) convey the relative explanatory strength of the independent variables within the models, the unstandardized coefficients (B) allow for comparisons of the effect sizes of those predictors between the models. The first key observation is that in each model, the predicted likelihood of ever receiving a specific benefit appears to have a significant, positive impact on public support for welfare distribution to the target group of that benefit. The more likely people consider it to be that they will benefit from a programme, the more they support welfare allocation to its target group (H1b). However, a cross-model comparison of the slopes suggests that perceived self-interest seems to play a greater role in shaping citizens’ opinions on welfare support for the unemployed than it does in forging their attitudes towards social welfare for pensioners and social assistance recipients. When attention is paid to within-model comparisons, it becomes obvious that perceptions of self-interest are not the strongest predictors of public support for social welfare.⁷

Table 2.

OLS regressions explaining the social legitimacy of targeted welfare (N = 1972).

	Model A: Pensioners(target of people’s insurance)		Model B: Unemployed(target of workers’ insurance)		Model C: Social assistance beneficiaries(target of social assistance)
	B	β	B	β	B	β
Perceived self-interest
Likelihood of receiving benefit X	0.066**	0.061	0.119***	0.099	0.084**	0.059
Perceived programme performance
Benefit fraud (0 = rarely)
Sometimes	−0.294**	−0.076	−0.261*	−0.073	−0.046	−0.012
Often	−0.771***	−0.097	−0.879***	−0.243	−0.934***	−0.242
Complexity	0.011	0.006	−0.261***	−0.127	−0.361***	−0.153
Efficiency	−0.008	−0.004	0.234***	0.112	0.288***	0.122
Fairness	0.129**	0.071	0.119*	0.057	0.095*	0.039
Societal cost	0.186***	0.085	0.280***	0.123	0.346***	0.146
Deservingness criteria
Reciprocity	−0.028	−0.014	−0.217**	−0.079	−0.450***	−0.156
Need	−0.201**	−0.086	−0.058	−0.024	0.003	0.001
R²	0.041		0.114		0.177

OLS: ordinary least squares.

p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

The second main observation is that the analyses largely confirm the hypothesis that the better citizens believe a specific benefit is performing, the more strongly they support the distribution of public resources to the target group of that benefit (H2b). The perceived prevalence of benefit fraud is among the strongest predictors of public support for targeted welfare. Those who believe that abuse occurs often are especially strong opponents of welfare provision. This effect does not differ much across the models, which indicates that perceived benefit fraud has an almost equally strong, negative effect on the social legitimacy of welfare allocation to pensioners, unemployed people and social assistance beneficiaries. Likewise, people who believe a welfare programme is efficiently organized, fair in practice and cheap for society are more likely to agree with high levels of welfare provision for its target group. The impact of perceived fairness, however, is relatively small compared with the effects of perceived efficiency and societal cost. One exception to the rule – for which we have no solid explanation yet – is that public support for social welfare does not increase, but, instead, decreases when perceptions of programme complexity become more favourable. It seems that citizens who judge unemployment insurance and social assistance to be relatively simple oppose welfare allocation to its target groups more strongly.

A final important point to note is that with the exception of the need criterion in the social assistance model, the effects of the deservingness criteria are consistently negative (confirming H3b–H4b). A higher emphasis on need or reciprocity appears to lower support for welfare distribution to pensioners, unemployed people and social assistance recipients. This finding lends empirical evidence to Larsen’s (2006) implicit assumption that deservingness perceptions have an adverse impact on people’s commitment to social welfare. However, Table 2 also shows that not all (negative) effects of the deservingness criteria are equally strong and statistically significant. A promising interpretation is that the impact of a deservingness criterion might be contingent on how the public at large evaluates the relevant target group on that criterion. Unfavourable evaluations may weaken the (negative) effect, and favourable evaluations may strengthen it. For example, the negligible, positive effect of the need criterion on people’s support for welfare distribution to social assistance beneficiaries is possibly due to the public’s awareness that this target group consists of poor citizens with high financial needs (Raven, 2012; Van Oorschot, 2006a). Similarly, it is plausible that the reciprocity criterion is such a strong, negative predictor in the social assistance model because the target group of this benefit is perceived to comprise low-income citizens paying a minimal amount of taxes and thus contributing only little to society (Van Oorschot, 2006a).

Conclusion and discussion

This article proposes a theoretical model that attempts to address two lacunae in existing welfare state literature concerning the institutions–attitudes nexus. By examining to what extent the link between income benefit design and welfare legitimacy is mediated by three types of popular perceptions, the present study (a) departs from the dominant yet perhaps inadequate welfare regime approach, and (b) explores some of the previously underexplored explanatory mechanisms that connect institutions to attitudes. The results show that perceptions of self-interest, programme performance and welfare deservingness are meaningfully related to the institutional set-up of three differently organized benefit schemes in the Netherlands. Citizens’ self-predicted likelihood of ever receiving the benefit is highest for citizenship-based people’s pensions, modest for contribution-based workers’ unemployment insurance and lowest for poverty-based social assistance. The pension system is also perceived to function considerably better than the other welfare programmes in terms of complexity, efficiency, effectivity and fairness. People’s emphasis on deservingness criteria appears to be in accordance with the normative principles embodied in the benefit schemes. Whereas the reciprocity criterion is stressed most regarding workers’ unemployment insurance, the need criterion is most important concerning the social assistance scheme. Furthermore, the three types of popular perceptions seem to affect the social legitimacy of welfare allocation to the target groups of the benefit schemes. The higher citizens’ perceived self-interest in and perceived performance of a welfare programme, the more strongly they support the distribution of public resources to its target group. The more strongly a person emphasizes the criteria of reciprocity or need, the more he or she opposes welfare provision.

Although these results may be confined to the particular Dutch case, the underlying theoretical model is certainly not. The Dutch welfare state is not, as sometimes suggested (Arts and Gelissen, 2002; Esping-Andersen, 1999), some kind of exceptional, hybrid enigma, as the three major ideal-typical social security constellations are, albeit in different configurations, present in all European welfare states. Therefore, the theoretical model and general hypotheses presented in this article should be directly transferrable to any other European country. This does not imply, however, that the concrete empirical outcomes of the model are also the same across countries. The Netherlands has been used several times before as a test case in welfare attitudes research. Cross-national studies following up on such Dutch case studies generally conclude that the underlying theoretical mechanisms may be generalizable, but the empirical patterns found in the Netherlands seem to be somewhat closer to those in other Western and Northern European countries than to those in Eastern and Southern Europe (Roosma et al., 2013; Van Oorschot et al., 2012).

The results presented above are challenged by two major shortcomings in our research design. The first is that it may be unable to separate the effects of institutional features from those of target group characteristics. For example, it is possible that the higher public support for social welfare targeted at pensioners is mainly due to the positive public image of the elderly (Van Oorschot, 2006a) rather than being a product of the universal citizenship-based design of the Dutch state pension system. There are two ways in which future research might deal with such an intertwinement of income benefit schemes and their respective target groups. One possible avenue is to conduct similar studies in national contexts in which target groups are covered by multiple schemes with differing institutional set-ups. In many European countries, for example, the majority of the elderly are protected by a contribution-based workers’ pension, yet those with insufficient contributions to the insurance fund, and a household income below the poverty threshold, are entitled to income support from a poverty-based social assistance scheme. Another option would be to apply the presented analytical framework in cross-national research designs. Comparative welfare state studies commonly examine the link between institutions and attitudes by clustering countries into regime dummy variables and subsequently testing to what extent citizens’ opinions differ between these clusters. An alternative and perhaps more fruitful methodological strategy would be to group differently organized income benefits across countries, while holding the target group constant. Imagine, for example, a cross-national study examining the relationship between institutional design and the social legitimacy of welfare distribution to the unemployed. Whereas a macro-level regime approach would presumably assign both Belgium and Germany to the corporatist cluster (Esping-Andersen, 1990), a meso-level benefit approach would separate the two countries, as the Hartz IV reforms have converted a considerable part of the German unemployment insurance into a poverty-based type of social provision (Goldschmidt, 2015), whereas the Belgian system remains more of a contribution-based type.

A second shortcoming pertains to the matter of causality. On one hand, institutional theory often implies that citizens adapt to whatever rational or normative incentives are embedded in institutions. On the other hand, democratic theory argues against such institutional determinism by claiming that policy actors have good reasons to be responsive to the public’s wishes (Brooks and Manza, 2006; Page and Shapiro, 1983). However, in the current study, possibly the most plausible causal chain runs from institutions to opinions, as previous work has suggested that

In [the] case of highly established and institutionalized policy areas such as unemployment schemes or old age pensions, public opinion will follow existing social policy designs. In [the] case of policy areas where the social policy design has not yet been fully established, such as labour market activation, social policy designs will follow public opinion. (Raven et al., 2011: 375)

As the three Dutch benefit schemes under examination were all established well before the 1970s (unemployment insurance and the AOW pension in the 1950s, and social assistance in the 1960s), they clearly belong to the category of highly institutionalized policy areas. Despite this suggestion, this study’s cross-sectional design is unable to discern causal relationships. As a result, only the tentative conclusion can be drawn that some popular attitudes appear to coincide with the institutional set-up of benefit schemes, in ways that are plausible from a theoretical point of view. Future research should attempt to further disentangle cause and effect by studying over-time trends in institutions and attitudes. Do changes in the institutional design of income benefit schemes temporally precede changes in popular perceptions and public support for social welfare, or vice versa?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Wim van Oorschot, Bart Meuleman, the anonymous referees and the editors of the Journal of European Social Policy for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of the article.

Funding

The research for this article was funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).

Notes

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