Research project Half a decade of structural change – a period of attitudinal stability?

While social class has been the primary explanatory factor for welfare state support, less attention has been paid to the gender dimension. Even less work has been devoted to the importance of the intersection of gender, class and education when it comes to attitudes to redistribution, taxes and inequality and to beliefs about public vs. private responsibilities and the scope of the state. 

Through the availability of previously untapped attitudinal data from the Metropolitan Study, collected in 1968, the aim of the project is to gain knowledge about the support for the welfare state among women around the time of family policy formation and women’s entry into the labor market, and of the relative importance of own social class, level of education and partner’s social class in this respect.

Besides being of obvious historical relevance, the approach taps onto the question of causality often raised in the debate on public opinion and welfare state development, i.e. whether popular opinion is a key driving force in the creation of welfare state programs, or if such programs primarily tend to generate support after their implementation? In addition to this, information about women's attitudes toward the welfare state before their full inclusion in it, gives the opportunity to evaluate the most influential theories concerning the tendency for women in most Western societies today, to be stronger supporters of the welfare state than men. Does it seem to mainly be about self-interest, or could it have to do with gender specific socialisation, encouraging women to hold more caring attitudes than men?

By comparing Swedish women’s attitudes to the welfare state in the late 1960s to those in the 2010s, using data from the SOM- and the Welfare State Surveys, the project also aims at gaining knowledge about the development of female welfare state support over almost half a century, involving fundamental change in women’s life conditions.