Do voters punish the government for welfare state retrenchment? A comparative study of electoral costs associated with social policy

This paper studies the claim that social policy retrenchment has tremendous electoral consequences. It analyzes the electoral impact of social policy attitudes in a comparative design (20 elections in Western OECD countries between 2001 and 2006). I find that punishment is conditional on the performance of governments, indicating that people punish or reward a government for its past actions. However, empirical comparison shows this to be true not only for social policy, but for all types of issues. This study shows that social policy does not have the outstanding relevance for voters as assumed by the social policy literature; accordingly, the electoral impact is only limited and not equally strong in all contexts. The context shapes the link between social policy attitudes and vote choice, but the variance in effect strength is not explained by differences in the institutional setting or the campaign saliency of social policy. Comparative European Politics (2010) 8, 415-443. doi:10.1057/cep.2009.4