Recent decades have seen increased interest in public attitudes towards public pension policies. Most previous research, however, relies heavily on dependent variables that fail to reflect the effective alternatives being discussed in most affluent democracies. This article seeks to improve our understanding of public attitudes towards pragmatic welfare policy options by examining cross-national differences in attitudes towards (i) cuts in old-age pension benefits, (ii) increases in social security contributions, and (iii) increases in the statutory retirement age. We test predictions of the dominant positive policy feedback theory and the alternative negative policy feedback theory. These approaches argue that policies induce consequences and attitudes that reinforce (positive feedback) or undermine (negative feedback) past policymaking trajectories. Empirical results obtained by multilevel analyses from a sample of 27 European countries are consistent mainly with the negative feedback approach. In countries with higher statutory retirement ages, citizens are more likely to support a postponement of retirement. However, in countries with higher elderly poverty, citizens are less likely to support cuts in pension benefits. In countries with higher social security contributions, citizens are less likely to support further increases in these contributions.

The demographic changes that have occurred in European countries in recent decades have made the policies of the public pension system one of the most debated issues of the welfare state. In this paper, I focus on preferences for three pension policy reforms with different distributive consequences: raising contributions, raising the age of retirement, and allowing free choice between public and private pension plans. I use multilevel models to analyse how individual attachment to different solidarity principles (universalistic, conservative, liberal and familistic) affects attitudes toward pension system reforms while controlling for institutional factors. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that solidarity principles have a significant influence on individual preferences. I find that individuals who adhere to universalistic or conservative principles are more in favour of increasing contributions in order to maintain the level of pensions, whereas they oppose a postponement of retirement age. In contrast, those who adhere to liberal or familistic principles are against increasing contributions and prefer extending retirement age. The findings at least partially support the ‘regime hypothesis’, as a more generous pension system appears to increase support for raising contributions while decreasing support for a raise in the age of retirement.

Several studies have shown that attitudes toward social policy are influenced by expectations of social mobility at the individual level and perceptions of social fluidity at the aggregate level. If individuals think of inequalities as the result of inherited disadvantages, they will be more willing to distribute resources from the rich to the poor. However, one important question remains open: How do individuals perceive the distribution of opportunities in society? In this paper we argue that individuals believe a society to be fair if opportunities for reaching the top of the social ladder are equally distributed among the population. That is, the distribution of resources is fair to the extent that individual outcomes do not depend on social origins. To address this issue, we asked a representative sample of individuals in the Spanish region of Andalusia what they think the chances are for persons of different social origins to achieve a high social status. We have found that those who think the chances for reaching the top are unequally distributed are those who support greater government responsibility and oppose meritocracy and competition, as they believe the initial distribution of opportunities to be unfair.

In this article we analyze preferences for tax schemes, using data on subjective evaluations of the taxes paid by different income groups. We estimate multilevel models to test the effect of socio-economic status and political ideology on individual preferences. We find that both self-interest motivations and political ideology are important factors in explaining preferences for tax schemes. At the national level, it is found that the fiscal burden shapes preferences for tax schemes (especially direct taxation) and it has an interacting effect with both self-interest and ideological variables. At higher levels of direct taxation, probabilities of supporting redistribution toward the poor and the rich become highly polarized along political affiliations. This suggests a mobilization effect. As direct taxation increases, left-wing parties strengthen their ability to mobilize their electorates to pursue further their redistributive interests, while right-wing voters increase their resistance to taxing the rich.